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Is  Jesus  God 


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IS  JESUS  GOD 

AN  ARGUMENT 

BY  GRADUATES  OF 

PRINCETON   SEMINARY 


With 
Introductory  Note  by 

PROF.  B.  B.  WARFIELD,  D.D. 


AMERICAN    TRACT    SOCIETY 
150   NASSAU    ST.,   NEW    YORK 


M« 


/ 


A 


. 


COPYRIGHT,    1912,    BY 
AMERICAN  TRACT  SOCIETY 


This  book  is  published  in 
commemoration  of  the  cen- 
tennial of  the  founding  of 
Princeton  Theological  Sem- 
inary, CELEBRATED  ON  MAY  5, 

6,  7,  1912. 


CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Does  the  Christian  Church  Teach  the  Deity 

of  Christ?   9 

By  Ricnk  Bouke  Kuiper. 

Has  the  Christian   Church  Always  Taught 

the  Deity  of  Christ?  23 

By  Daniel  Stephanus  Burger  Joubert. 

Do  the   New  Testament  Writers  Teach  the 

Deity  of  Christ?   43 

By  Harm  Henry  Mecter. 

Do  the  Evangelists  Represent  Christ  as  Him- 
self Teaching  His  Deity? 

First  Essay    61 

By  Johannes  Daniel  Roos. 

Second  Essay  74 

By  Frank  Mackey  Richardson. 

Did  Jesus  Teach  His  Own  Deity? 

First   Essay    82 

By  William  Arthur  M otter. 

Second  Essay  96 

By  William  Nicol. 

Is  Christ  God? 

First  Essay  114 

By  Gerrit  Hoeksema. 

Second  Essay  136 

By  Luther  Moore  Bicknell. 


INTRODUCTORY  NOTE. 

This  little  volume  offers  a  constructive  ar- 
gument for  the  Deity  of  Christ.  It  owes  its 
origin  to  an  attempt  by  the  members  of  a 
class  in  Princeton  Theological  Seminary,  dur- 
ing the  session  of  1911-1912 — the  Centennial 
Session  of  the  Seminary — to  give  a  reasoned 
answer  to  a  series  of  inquiries.  These,  taken 
in  sequence,  raised  the  salient  questions  which 
every  one  must  face  who  undertakes  to  in- 
vestigate historically  the  evidence  for  the 
Deity  of  Christ.  These  inquiries,  in  their  or- 
der, were : — 

1.  Does  the  Christian    Church  teach    the 

Deity  of  Christ? 

2.  Has  the  Christian  Church  always  taught 

the  Deity  of  Christ? 

3.  Do  the  New  Testament  writers  teach 

the  Deity  of  Christ? 

4.  Do  the  Evangelists  represent  Christ  as 

Himself  teaching  His  Deity? 

5.  Did  Jesus  teach  His  own  Deity? 

6.  Is  Christ  God? 


Introductory  Note. 

A  considerable  number  of  essays  were  pre- 
sented on  each  of  these  topics.  Those  here 
printed  were  selected  because  they  seemed  to 
fit  well  into  one  another,  and  together  to  pre- 
sent a  solid  argument  for  the  ultimate  con- 
clusion. Naturally,  the  essays  should  be  read 
consecutively  and  with  regard  to  their  relation 
to  one  another,  that  their  force  may  be  felt. 
As  the  importance  of  the  topics  increases  pro- 
gressively, it  has  been  thought  well,  while  but 
one  essay  is  printed  on  each  of  the  earlier,  to 
print  two  on  each  of  the  later  of  them.  This 
entails  some  slight  repetition,  but  it  is  hoped 
will  be  found  to  add  strength  to  the  general 
presentation  of  the  argument. 

It  is  with  great  confidence  that  I  place  these 
essays  by  a  company  of  earnest  young  men, 
seeking  (and  finding)  the  truth,  before  a 
larger  public  than  that  for  which  they  were 
prepared,  asking  for  them  a  candid — I  scarce- 
ly need  ask  an  indulgent — reading. 

Benjamin  B.  Warfield. 

Princeton  Theological  Seminary, 


DOES  THE   CHRISTIAN   CHURCH 

TEACH   THE    DEITY 

OF  CHRIST? 

By  Rienk  Bouke  Kuiper. 

Before  a  satisfactory  answer  can  be  given 
to  this  question  it  is  necessary  to  define  some 
of  its  terms.  What  is  meant  by  "the  Chris- 
tian Church"  ?  Not  the  "holy  catholic  church" 
of  the  Apostles'  Creed  which  includes  the 
whole  body  of  Christ  of  all  times  and  lands  as 
one  spiritual  organism;  our  question  is  con- 
cerned only  with  the  present.  Again,  we  have 
to  do  with  the  Church  in  its  visible  aspect;  be- 
cause of  our  inability  to  say  who  are  and  who 
are  not  members  of  the  invisible  Church,  we 
can  successfully  investigate  the  teaching  only 
of  the  visible  Church.  We  must  also  here 
face  the  question  which  very  naturally  presents 
itself,  Can  a  Church  that  denies  the  deity  of 
Christ  be  called  Christian  ?  It  is  evident  that 
a  negative  answer  to  this  question  at  this  stage 


io  Is  Jesus  God? 

of  the  discussion  would  at  once  destroy  the 
whole  problem.  For  if  only  that  Church 
which  teaches  the  deity  of  Christ  is  truly  Chris- 
tian, then  of  course  the  Christian  Church 
teaches  the  deity  of  Christ,  or  else  there  is  no 
Christian  Church.  We  are  constrained  there- 
fore to  take  the  term  Christian  Church  simply 
in  its  conventional  sense.  It  includes  the  whole 
body  of  those  who  are  members  of  any  insti- 
tution called  a  Church  which  professes  to  be, 
not  Jewish,  Mohammedan,  or  pagan,  but 
Christian. 

The  term  "deity  of  Christ"  must  next  be 
defined.  There  is  little  or  no  question  as  to 
what  the  earliest  followers  of  Christ,  the  early 
Church,  and  in  fact  orthodox  Christianity 
of  succeeding  times,  have  meant  when  the 
dogma  has  been  confessed.  What  has  been 
meant  is  clearly  and  unambiguously  stated 
in  the  ecumenical  creeds.  It  is  confessed 
that  Christ  is  the  only  begotten  Son  of 
God,  his  Son  therefore  in  a  sense  in 
which  no  other  being  can  possibly  be  called 
.God's  Son,  perfect  God,  of  the  substance  of 
the  Father.  To  put  the  case  briefly,  the  term 
deity  of  Christ  in  its  historical  meaning  im- 


Is  Jesus  Godf  ii 

plies  nothing  less  than  the  unity  of  substance 
of  the  Father  and  his  Son  Jesus  Christ.  He 
who  accepts  the  deity  of  Christ  in  this  sense 
confesses  that  Christ  is  God  in  that  sense  in 
which  there  is  but  one  God.  This  meaning  we 
shall  attach  to  the  term  in  the  attempt  to  an- 
swer our  question.  We  need  not  defend  our- 
selves for  so  doing.  On  the  contrary,  any- 
body who  wishes  to  attach  any  other  sense 
whatsoever  to  the  term  needs  to  defend  his 
course  of  action.  The  phrase,  the  deity  of 
Christ,  has  a  historical  meaning,  and  if  any- 
body desires  to  deny  the  dogma  in  this  sense 
and  yet  wishes  to  maintain  it  in  a  modified 
sense,  he  should,  we  believe,  for  the  sake  of 
veracity,  invent  another  formula  to  give  ex- 
pression to  his  view  of  the  person  of  Christ. 

From  what  has  just  been  said  the  transition 
to  the  problem  proper  is  easy.  There  are 
theologians  at  the  present  time,  not  a  few  of 
them  within  the  pale  of  the  Church,  who  hold 
modified  views  concerning  Christ's  deity  or 
divinity,  or  possibly  deny  the  doctrine  alto- 
gether. In  the  Appendix  to  Hastings'  Dic- 
tionary of  Christ  and  the  Gospels  A.  S.  Mar- 
tin treats  of  "Christ  in  Modern  Thought" 


12  Is   Jesus    God? 

and  distinguishes  between  the  Christ  of  specu- 
lation, the  Christ  of  experience,  and  the  Christ 
of  history.  The  Christ  of  speculation  is  de- 
nied pre-existence,  sinless  birth,  resurrection, 
divine  authority  and  sole  mediation.  Yet  he  is 
called  the  Son  of  God,  but  in  the  same  sense 
in  which  men  are  sons  of  God.  The  Christ  of 
experience,  to  a  large  extent  a  product  of  the 
Ritschlian  school,  is  admitted  to  be  divine,  but 
not  in  the  old  dogmatic  sense.  His  divinity  is 
said  to  consist  in  the  fact  that  his  will  was  in 
perfect  harmony  with  God's  and  that  in  the 
moral  sphere  he  displayed  the  highest  divine 
attributes.  The  Christ  of  history  is  much 
more  openly  denied  all  divinity.  He  is  stripped 
of  supernaturalism  and  all  the  emphasis  is 
placed  on  his  true  humanity.  The  secret  of 
his  success  is  said  to  lie  in  his  psychological 
uniqueness,  i.  e.>  in  his  unequalled  goodness 
and  greatness.  But  he  is  not  divine.  We 
cannot  forbear  calling  attention  here  to  some 
of  the  fine  phrases  which  William  Adams 
Brown  uses  in  his  Essence  of  Christianity, 
when  he  speaks  of  Jesus  Christ  as  the  central 
figure  of  Christianity.  He  calls  God  the 
Father  of  Christ,  but  only  after  he  has  called 


Is   Jesus    Godf  13 

him  the  Father  of  us  all  in  seemingly  the  same 
sense  in  the  immediately  preceding  sentence 
(p.  313).  Again  he  says:  "Sonship  takes  on 
a  larger  meaning.  .  .  .  We  still  recognize 
man's  littleness,  .  .  .  but  the  recognition  loses 
its  terrors  as  in  Christ  we  perceive  what  man 
may  become."  These  words  may  be  inter- 
preted, no  doubt,  in  an  orthodox  sense;  but  do 
they  not  tend  greatly  to  obscure  the  uniqueness 
of  Christ's  Sonship? 

Finally  we  must  call  attention  to  the  Uni- 
tarian movement.  The  phrase  "the  pure 
humanity  of  Jesus"  covers  a  variety  of  con- 
victions. Some  Unitarians  are  almost  Trin- 
itarians, approaching  Christ  on  the  divine 
side  and  affirming,  though  in  an  unorthodox 
sense,  his  pre-existence,  uniqueness,  sinless- 
ness,  etc.  Others  contemplate  the  human 
side,  and  believe  that  he  was  naturally  born 
and  endowed  with  qualities  and  gifts  differing 
in  degree  and  not  in  kind  from  those  which  all 
men  enjoy.  All  this  makes  it  clear  that  there 
are  men  today  who  deny  the  deity  of  Christ 
or  accept  the  doctrine  only  in  an  unorthodox 
sense;  and  it  is  an  undisputed  fact  that  some 
of  them  are  in  the  Church. 


14  Is    Jesus    God? 

The  question  now  arises  whether  the  teach- 
ing of  these  individuals  or  even  groups  can  be 
said  to  be  that  of  the  Christian  Church.  We 
believe  that  the  answer  must  be  an  emphatic 
negative.  To  substantiate  our  conviction  we 
shall  dwell  first  of  all  on  the  attitude  of  the 
Church  toward  deniers  and  modifiers  of  the 
doctrine  of  the  deity  of  Christ,  and  thereupon 
call  attention  to  the  positive  confession  of 
Christ's  deity  by  the  Church. 

First,  attention  must  be  called  to  the  reac- 
tion among  the  theologians  themselves  against 
the  denial  of  Christ's  deity.  We  may  refer 
here  to  such  men  as  Kunze,  Steinbeck,  Braig, 
Hoberg,  Weber,  and  Esser,  A.  M.  Fairbairn, 
and  Forsyth.  After  all,  however,  the  teach- 
ing of  the  Church  is  not  determined  by  a  few 
theologians,  but  we  must  give  heed  to  the  ex- 
pression of  its  faith  by  the  Church  as  a  whole, 
which  includes  comparatively  unlearned  men 
as  well  as  theologians,  laymen  no  less  than  the 
clergy.  Now  is  the  Church  being  influenced  to 
any  considerable  extent  by  denials  and  modi- 
fications of  the  doctrine  of  Christ's  deity?  We 
believe  not.  Take  for  example  the  attempt  to 
get  at  "the  historical  Christ."    This  example 


Is   Jesus   God?  15 

is  a  fair  one  for  there  are  no  truths  which  more 
readily  gain  assent  or  are  more  firmly  retained 
than  those  of  an  historical  order.  Therefore 
also  they  are  most  within  the  grasp  of  the 
popular  mind  and  can  be  expected  to  touch  the 
instincts  of  popular  faith.  Has,  then,  the  so- 
called  historical  Christ  succeeded  in  displacing 
the  so-called  dogmatic  Christ?  Evidently  not. 
The  average  church  member  of  today,  just 
as  his  father  and  grandfather,  still  derives  his 
view  of  the  person  of  Christ  from  the  writings 
of  the  Evangelists  and  the  Apostles.  Now  it 
is  precisely  the  integrity  of  the  Gospels  and 
Epistles  as  a  reliable  source  of  information 
and  the  validity  of  the  claims  which  Christ 
made  for  himself  which  have  been  attacked  by 
those  who  wish  to  present  to  us  the  real  Christ 
of  history.  It  is  evident  therefore  that  they 
have  not  persuaded  the  Church  to  take  as 
much  as  the  first  step  away  from  the  super- 
natural Christ. 

But  neither  has  the  Church  lent  its  ear  to 
those  clever  theologians  who  have  tried  and 
are  trying  to  give  a  new  meaning  to  the  term, 
the  deity  of  Christ.  The  very  fact  that  they 
are  using  old,  well-established  terms  to  intro- 


1 6  Is   Jesus    God? 

duce  their  new  ideas  may  be  called  an  admis- 
sion on  their  part  that  they  have  not  yet  gained 
their  point.  It  is  a  perilous  undertaking  to 
judge  motives,  but  does  it  not  seem  that  some 
present-day  theologians  are  trying  to  gain  ac- 
ceptance for  their  views  of  Christ's  person  un- 
der cover  of  the  term  "divinity  of  Christ," 
just  because  they  know  only  too  well  that  in  no 
other  way  will  they  ever  succeed  in  introduc- 
ing their  ideas  into  a  Church  which  still  clings 
tenaciously  to  the  true  deity  of  Christ?  And 
what,  it  may  be  asked,  does  the  average 
church  member  know  of  a  deity  of  Christ 
which  is  no  deity  but  perhaps  only  a  very  high 
kind  of  humanity?  Men  are  still  too  straight- 
forward, too  unsophisticated,  to  mean  any- 
thing by  the  deity  of  Christ  except  that  Christ 
is  God. 

And  what  is  the  Church's  attitude  toward 
Unitarianism?  On  more  than  one  occasion 
when  a  gathering  has  been  held  of  representa- 
tives of  different  Christian  denominations, 
the  Unitarians  have  been  excluded  because 
they  deny  the  deity  of  Christ.  In  these  cases 
the  Church,  at  any  rate  some  Churches,  af- 
firmed that  denial  of  Christ's  deity  excludes 


Is   Jesus   God?  17 

from  the  Christian  Church.  In  Hastings'  Dic- 
tionary of  Christ  and  the  Gospels  under  the 
article  "Divinity  of  Christ"  the  Unitarians 
are  spoken  of  as  deniers  of  the  doctrine.  The 
article  concludes  with  these  words:  "Unita- 
rianism  has  at  all  times  failed  to  lead.  The 
Church  has  never  become  a  prey  to  the  nar- 
rower reason  and  limited  emotions  of  the 
Unitarian  schools." 

When  we  deny  that  the  Church  has  been  led 
to  abandon  the  doctrine  of  the  deity  of  Christ, 
we  do  not  say  that  it  does  in  every  case  reject 
false  teachings  on  this  point  as  vigorously  as 
it  should.  If  it  did,  there  would  not  be  a  sin- 
gle individual  in  the  Church  who  openly  de- 
nies Christ's  deity.  It  is  indeed  a  deplorable 
fact  that  it  is  possible  for  men  who  do  not 
believe  in  Christ's  deity  to  retain  their  places 
in  Christ's  Church.  We  may  not  adopt  the 
well-known  device  of  the  ostrich  with  refer- 
ence to  this  fact,  nor  may  we  make  light  of  it 
under  cover  of  a  superficial  optimism.  Still, 
though  it  may  be,  and  is,  true,  that  the  Church 
should  more  eagerly  oppose  errors  in  this  re- 
spect, it  would  be  difficult  to  say  how  the 
Church  could  more  clearly  in  a  positive  way 


1 8  Is   Jesus    God? 

affirm  its  belief  in  Christ's  deity  than  it  does. 
To  this  we  now  call  attention. 

The  Christian  Church,  Roman  Catholic  and 
Protestant,  professes  in  the  Apostles'  Creed  to 
believe  in  Jesus  Christ,  the  only  Son  of  God 
the  Father.  In  many  parts  of  the  Christian 
Church  this  creed  is  accustomed  to  be  sol- 
emnly repeated  on  every  Sabbath.  Two  things 
are  here  emphasized:  that  Christ  is  the  Son 
of  God,  and  that  his  Sonship  is  unique;  viz., 
that  he  is  the  Son  of  God  in  a  sense  in  which 
no  one  else  can  be  called  a  son  of  God.  That 
he  is  the  Son  of  God  means  that  he  is  God. 
We  cannot  dwell  at  length  on  the  supernatural 
character  of  Christ  which  is  strongly  affirmed 
in  the  immediately  following  articles  of  this 
creed.  Suffice  it  to  say  that  it  cannot  be  pre- 
dicated of  any  being  who  is  anything  less  than 
divine.  Just  think,  for  example,  of  the  judg- 
ment of  quick  and  dead  ascribed  to  him,  which 
is  the  work  of  God  alone.  And  what  clear 
expressions  of  Christ's  deity  are  to  be  found 
in  the  Nicene  and  so-called  Athanasian  creeds, 
which  though  not  so  well  known  as  the  Apos- 
tles', are  yet  recognized  by  many  Churches  as 
authoritative.      Again   how    clearly   Christ's 


Is   Jesus   God?  19 

deity  is  affirmed  in  the  separate  creeds  of  the 
Churches,  Reformed,  Lutheran,  and  others. 
Nobody  doubts  this.  In  view  of  the  confes- 
sion of  Christ's  deity  in  these  creeds  of  parts 
of  the  Church  and  the  clear  confession  of  it 
by  the  whole  Church  in  the  Apostles'  Creed, 
it  cannot  be  doubted  that  the  Church  teaches 
Christ's  deity. 

But  not  only  in  its  creeds  does  the  Church 
confess  Christ's  deity.  It  does  so  in  its  songs. 
It  speaks  thus: 

"Forbid  it,  Lord,  that  I  should  boast 
Save  in  the  death  of  Christ,  my  God." 

And  here  especially  does  the  unity  of  spirit  of 
the  whole  Church  of  Christ  appear.  To  quote 
Principal  Fairbairn:  "The  high  Anglican 
praises  his  Saviour  in  the  strains  of  Luther  and 
Isaac  Watts,  Gerhardt  and  Doddridge;  the 
severe  Puritan  and  Independent  rejoices  in  the 
sweet  and  gracious  songs  of  Keble  and  Faber, 
Newman  and  Lyte;  the  keen  and  rigid  Pres- 
byterian feels  his  soul  uplifted  as  well  by  the 
hymns  of  Bernard  and  Xavier,  Wordsworth 
and  Mason  Neale,  as  by  the  Psalms  of  David. 
And  this  unity  in  praise  and  worship  which  so 


20  Is   Jesus    God? 

transcends  and  cancels  the  distinctions  of  com- 
munity and  sect,  but  expresses  the  unity  of 
faith  and  fellowship  of  heart  in  the  Son  of 
God." 

Then  think  of  the  divine  honor  which  the 
Church  assigns  to  Christ.  We  shall  mention 
but  a  few  of  the  most  apparent  ways  in  which 
the  Church  honors  Christ  as  God.  It  prays 
to  him  just  as  it  does  to  the  Father,  and  in 
doing  so  it  assumes  that  he  is  omniscient,  omni- 
present, and  omnipotent;  in  fine  it  ascribes  at- 
tributes to  him  which  manifestly  belong  only 
to  God.  Every  time  the  benediction  is  pro- 
nounced upon  the  congregation  the  Church 
makes  Christ  equal  to  God.  He  is  mentioned 
alongside  of  the  Father  without  a  hint  at  sub- 
ordination. Yes,  "the  grace  of  our  Lord 
Jesus  Christ"  is  spoken  of  even  before  "the 
love  of  God  the  Father,"  not,  to  be  sure,  be- 
cause Christ  is  placed  above  the  Father,  but 
because  he  is  not  inferior  to  him.  And  when- 
ever the  sacrament  of  baptism  is  administered, 
the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity,  which  makes 
Christ  the  Son  of  God  and  therefore  himself 
God,  is  pronounced  over  him  who  through 
baptism  is  declared  a  member  of  the  Christian 


Is   Jesus    God?  21 

Church.  Whenever  therefore  the  Church  re- 
ceives a  new  member  it  confesses  its  belief  in 
Christ's  deity. 

And  does  not  the  Church  finally  confess  that 
Christ  is  God  when  it  teaches  men  to  flee  to 
him  and  in  its  prayers  itself  goes  to  him  for 
the  forgiveness  of  sins?  To  be  sure  we  are 
accustomed,  and  rightly  so,  to  ask  God  to  par- 
don our  sins  for  Christ's  sake,  and  even  when 
we  do  this  we  confess  that  man  cannot  free 
himself  from  the  guilt  of  sin,  but  that  he  needs 
the  sacrifice  of  God's  own  Son.  But  how  much 
more  emphatically  does  the  Church  confess  its 
faith  in  Christ  as  God  when  it  instinctively 
flees  to  him  personally  with  its  burden  of  guilt 
and  urges  others  to  do  the  same!  For  the 
doctrine  that  only  God  can  forgive  sins  is  not 
peculiarly  Rabbinical  or  Jewish,  it  is  rooted  in 
the  universal  consciousness  of  man.  Every- 
body who  feels  the  burden  of  his  sins  weigh- 
ing upon  him  instinctively  flees  to  his  God  or 
his  gods  for  deliverance.  This  applies  to  the 
pagan  as  well  as  to  the  Christian.  And  he 
cannot  rest  until  he  feels  in  the  depth  of  his 
heart  that  God  has  declared  him  free  from 
all  guilt.     The  principle  underlying  the  ques- 


22  Is   Jesus    God? 

tion  of  the  Jews:  "Who  can  forgive  sins  but 
God  only?"  is  correct,  and  everybody  who 
knows  what  sin  is,  knows  this  also.  Every- 
body therefore  who  asks  Christ  to  forgive  his 
sins  thereby  expresses  faith  in  his  deity.  It 
is  said  that  the  Christian  Church  is  tending  to 
relegate  dogmas  to  the  background  in  favor 
of  ethics  and  morality.  This  is  true;  and  it 
is  quite  possible,  and  even  likely,  that  this 
tendency  will  cause  many  to  lose  sight  of  the 
importance  of  Christ's  deity.  We  can  safely 
even  go  so  far  as  to  say  that  it  is  already  hav- 
ing this  deplorable  effect.  This  fact  is  indeed 
a  sad  one.  Yet  we  need  not  be  disheartened, 
for  so  long  as  the  Holy  Ghost  truly  convicts 
men  of  sin,  they  will  feel  the  need  of  a  divine 
Saviour. 

When  Peter  had  confessed:  "Thou  art  the 
Christ,  the  Son  of  the  living  God,"  Jesus  re- 
plied: "Thou  art  Peter;  and  upon  this  rock 
will  I  build  my  church,  and  the  gates  of  hell 
shall  not  prevail  against  it."  These  words  of 
the  Saviour  have  to  the  present  time  not  failed 
of  fulfillment.  The  Church  today  believes  and 
teaches  the  deity  of  Christ.  The  gates  of  hell 
have  not  prevailed  against  it. 


HAS  THE  CHRISTIAN  CHURCH 

ALWAYS  TAUGHT  THE 

DEITY  OF  CHRIST? 

By  Daniel  Stephanus  Burger  Joubert. 

The  question,  What  think  ye  of  Christ?  has 
been  variously  answered  through  the  ages. 
Humanitarians  say  that  Christ  is  a  man  and 
nothing  more.  Arians  say  that  though  he  was 
a  creature,  he  is  more  than  man.  The  Chris- 
tian Church  has  through  the  ages  given  but 
one  answer,  namely,  that  he  is  both  God  and 
man.  It  is  to  the  former  element  in  this  an- 
swer that  we  have  to  give  our  attention,  to 
show  that  at  all  times  the  Christian  Church 
has  consistently  taught  the  deity  of  Christ. 
That  this  has  been  the  firm  belief  of  the 
Church  all  along  may  be  shown  in  two  ways. 
For  a  belief  may  be  professed  either  by  stat- 
ing it  in  terms  or  by  acting  in  a  manner  that 
necessarily  implies  it.  And  there  is  after  all 
no  essential  difference  between  the  expression 

23 


24  Is    Jesus    God? 

of  a  conviction  in  language  and  its  consistent 
reflection  in  life. 

We  shall  first  consider  the  last  of  these  state- 
ments. How  then  was  this  belief  reflected  in 
the  life  of  the  early  Christians?  In  other 
words,  did  the  Ante-Nicene  Church  as  a  whole, 
its  congregations  of  worshippers,  its  poor,  its 
young,  its  unlettered,  as  well  as  its  saints  and 
martyrs,  so  act  and  speak  as  to  imply  a  belief 
that  Jesus  Christ  is  actually  God?  To  this  the 
history  of  the  Christian  Church  has  but  one 
reply:  That  she  believed  in  the  divinity  of 
Christ  is  manifested  by  the  universal  practice 
of  adoring  and  worshipping  him. 

The  existence  of  sects  which  refused  to 
acknowledge  the  divinity  of  Christ  and  the 
uncertainties  of  some  of  those  who  did  ac- 
knowledge him,  are  alleged  by  some  as  a 
ground  for  denying  to  that  age  any  assured 
belief  in  Christ's  divinity.  But  the  existing 
material  does  not  warrant  the  conclusion. 
Christ  is  everywhere  adored  as  God.  The 
early  Church  not  only  admired  Christ  but  she 
worshipped  him.  As  one  has  said,  uShe  ap- 
proached his  majestic  person  in  that  way  of 
tribute,  of  prayer,  of  self-prostration,  of  self- 


Is   Jesus    God?  25 

surrender,  by  which  all  serious  theists,  whether 
Christian  or  non-Christian,  are  accustomed  to 
express  their  relationship  as  creatures  to  the 
Almighty  Creator."  Moreover  this  worship 
of  Jesus  was  never  protested  against  in  the 
churches  as  something  new,  something  un- 
heard of,  something  detracting  from  the 
honor  due  to  God.  Neither  was  there  ever  a 
time  when  he  was  invoked  simply  as  a  saint. 

This  adoration  of  Jesus  began  in  his  earthly 
life,  continued  after  his  ascension,  and  has  be- 
come the  inheritance  of  succeeding  ages.     As 
an  infant  he  was  worshipped  by  the  wise  men. 
The  leper  worshipped  him,  saying,  "Lord,  if 
thou  wilt,  thou  canst  make  me  clean."     The 
man  who  was  born  blind  confessed  his  faith  in 
the  Son  of  God  and  accompanied  it  by  an  act 
of  worship:    "And  he  said,  Lord,  I  believe, 
and  he  worshipped  him."  Thus  also  at  Jesus's 
ascension  the  disciples  worshipped  him.     No 
sooner  had  Christ  ascended  on  high  than  he 
began  to  draw  all  men  unto  him.    This  attrac- 
tion was  not  only  assent  to  his  teaching  but 
adoration  of  his  person.       As  Liddon  says: 
"No  sooner  had  he  ascended  to  his  throne  than 
there  burst  upward  from   the  heart  of  his 


26  Is   Jesus    God? 

Church  a  tide  of  adoration  which  has  only 
become  wider  and  deeper  with  the  lapse  of 
time." 

In  the  first  days  of  the  Christian  Church 
the  Christians  were  known  as  "those  who 
called  upon  the  name  of  Jesus  Christ."  Prayer 
to  Jesus  was  the  devotional  act  which  espe- 
cially characterized  the  Christian.  Stephen's 
last  cry  was  a  prayer  to  Jesus.  The  words 
which  Jesus  addresses  to  the  Father  are  by 
Stephen  addressed  to  Jesus.  At  his  conversion 
Saul  of  Tarsus  surrendered  himself  to  Christ 
as  the  only  and  lawful  Lord  of  his  being. 
"Lord,  what  wilt  thou  have  me  do?"  he  cried. 
Thus  we  see  that  the  worship  paid  to  Jesus 
in  apostolic  times  was  that  worship  which  is 
due  to  God  alone.  This  worship  of  Jesus  was 
handed  down  to  succeeding  ages  and  has  be- 
come an  integral  part  of  the  spiritual  life  of 
the  Church. 

Coming  now  to  the  early  fathers,  we  find 
that  they  refer  to  the  worship  of  our  Lord  as 
a  matter  beyond  dispute.  Ignatius  asks  the 
Roman  Christians  to  put  up  litanies  to  Christ 
that  he  might  attain  to  the  distinction  of  mar- 
tyr.   Justin  protests  to  the  emperor  that  the 


Is   Jesus    God?  27 

Christians  worshipped  God  alone,  yet  he  adds 
significantly  that  the  Son  and  the  Spirit  share 
in  the  same  reverence  which  is  offered  to  the 
Father.  In  the  so-called  second  letter  of 
Clement  we  also  find  the  words:  "Brethren, 
we  ought  so  to  think  of  Christ  as  the  Son  of 
the  living  God,  as  of  the  judge  of  the  quick  and 
the  dead."  Clement  of  Alexandria  in  one  of  his 
treatises  says:  "Believe,  O  man,  in  Him  who 
is  both  man  and  God;  believe,  O  man,  in  Him, 
the  living  God,  who  suffered  and  is  adored.'' 
Origen  reports  Celsus  who  wrote  against  the 
Christians  as  saying:  "The  worship  of  Christ 
is  fatal  to  the  Christian  doctrine  of  the  unity 
of  God,  while  they  offer  an  excessive  adoration 
to  this  person  who  has  lately  appeared  in  the 
world.  How  can  they  think  that  they  commit 
no  offence  against  God,  by  giving  these  divine 
honors  to  his  Son?"  Christ  was  not  only  be- 
lieved to  be  divine  and  adored  as  divine,  but 
it  was  clearly  taught  that  he  was  divine.  The 
Ante-Nicene  "rules  of  faith"  as  they  are  found 
in  the  writings  of  Irenasus,  Origen,  Tertullian, 
Cyprian,  are  in  essential  agreement  with  the 
Apostles'  Creed  as  it  appears  in  the  fourth 
century.    They  all  confess  the  divine-human 


28  Is    Jesus    God? 

character  of  Christ  as  the  chief  object  of  the 
Christian  faith,  but  this  is  done  in  ordinary 
popular  style,  not  in  the  form  of  doctrinal, 
logical  statement.  The  baptismal  formula  of 
that  period  also  maintains  strictly  the  New 
Testament  practice  of  combining  the  Son  with 
the  Father  and  the  Spirit. 

Hymns  have  always  been  a  popular  instru- 
ment for  the  expression  of  religious  feeling 
and  worship;  and  from  the  earliest  years  of 
Christianity  they  were  consecrated  to  the 
honor  and  worship  of  Christ.  Eusebius  quotes 
the  following:  "The  psalms  and  hymns  of 
the  brethren,  which  from  the  earliest  days  of 
Christianity  have  been  written  by  the  faithful, 
all  celebrate  Christ,  the  Word  of  God,  pro- 
claiming his  divinity."  Of  these  early  hymns 
of  the  Church  some  remain  to  this  day  as  a 
witness  to  Christ's  divinity.  Such  are  the 
Gloria  in  Excelsis  which  was  the  daily  morn- 
ing hymn  of  the  Eastern  Church,  the  Tersanc- 
tus,  the  hymn  of  Clement  of  Alexandria  to 
the  Divine  Logos.  Pliny  writing  to  the  em- 
peror says:  "It  appeared  that  on  a  stated  day 
the  Christians  met  before  daybreak  and  sang 
a  hymn  to  Christ  as  God."    This  is  not  a  mere 


Is   Jesus    God?  29 

vague  report  but  a  definite  answer  elicited  from 
several  persons  in  cross-examination.  The 
value  of  these  hymns,  teaching  the  deity  of 
Christ,  is  clearly  shown  by  the  conduct  of  Paul 
of  Samosata.  He  banished  them  from  his 
churches  because  he  did  not  wish  to  confess 
with  the  Church  that  the  Son  of  God  had  de- 
scended from  heaven.  He  held  Christ  was  a 
mere  man;  that  he  was  from  below  and  raised 
to  divine  rank. 

Next  we  come  to  the  witness  of  the  martyrs 
who  preferred  death  to  replacing  Christ  by 
the  emperor  in  their  worship.  The  death-cry 
of  many  a  martyr  shows  us  the  divine  honor 
paid  by  the  Christians  to  Christ.  Here  we 
have  part  of  the  prayers  of  two.  Felix  an 
African  bishop  cries:  uO  Lord,  God  of  heaven 
and  earth,  Jesus  Christ,  to  Thee  do  I  bend  my 
neck  by  way  of  sacrifice,  O  Thou  who  abidest 
forever."  Polycarp  exclaims  at  his  martyr- 
dom :  "For  all  things,  O  God,  do  I  praise  and 
bless  and  glorify  Thee,  together  with  the 
eternal  and  heavenly  Jesus  Christ,  Thy  well- 
beloved  Son,  with  whom  to  Thee  and  the 
Holy  Ghost  be  glory  both  now  and  forever." 
Someone  has  said,  "Thus  it  was  that  the  mar- 


30  Is   Jesus    God? 

tyrs  prayed  and  died;  their  voices  reach  us 
across  the  intervening  centuries,  but  time  can- 
not impair  their  moral  majesty  or  weaken  the 
accents  of  their  strong  and  simple  conviction." 
This  worship  of  Jesus  by  the  martyrs  is  full 
of  the  deepest  elements  of  worship;  nothing 
short  of  a  belief  in  the  absolute  divinity  of 
Jesus  could  justify  such  worship. 

In  the  second  place,  we  wish  to  show  how 
this  belief  in  the  deity  of  Christ  was  expressed 
in  living  terms  by  the  early  Church  either 
through  its  prominent  leaders  or  in  the  coun- 
cils of  the  whole  Church,  when  attacked  by 
adverse  criticism  and  heresies.  Such  a  doc- 
trine as  the  deity  of  Christ  could  not  at  first 
bring  peace  to  the  earth;  it  could  not  help 
bringing  division.  "It  could  not  help  dividing 
families,  cities,  nations,  continents,  and  it 
would  have  utterly  collapsed  when  confronted 
with  the  heat  of  opposition  it  provoked  had  it 
not  descended  from  the  Source  of  all  truth." 
We  may  say  that  the  ecclesiastical  development 
of  this  fundamental  dogma  started  from 
Peter's  confession  (Mat.  xvi.,  16),  "Thou  art 
the  Christ,  the  Son  of  the  living  God,"  and 
John's  doctrine  of  the  incarnate  Logos  (John 


Is   Jesus    God?  31 

L,  14),  "And  the  Word  became  flesh  and 
dwelt  among  us."  This  central  truth  of 
Christ's  divine  person  and  work  is  set  forth  in 
the  New  Testament  writings,  however,  not  so 
much  in  the  form  of  a  logically  formulated 
dogma,  as  of  a  living  fact,  an  object  of  faith 
and  a  source  of  strength.  And  the  mind  of 
the  Church  required  for  a  season  to  meditate 
upon  and  try  to  grasp  what  this  implied. 

Theological  speculation  on  the  Person  of 
Christ  began  with  Justin  Martyr  and  was  car- 
ried on  by  Clement  of  Alexandria  and  Origen 
in  the  East,  and  Irenaeus,  Hippolytus  and  Ter- 
tullian  in  the  West.  It  would  have  been  im- 
possible for  these  fathers  and  the  Christian 
world  to  have  drawn  from  the  teachings  of 
the  evangelists  and  the  apostles  any  other  con- 
clusion than  that  Christ  was  more  than  man, — 
God  manifest  in  the  flesh.  The  Gospels  spoke 
of  his  incarnation,  his  sinlessness,  his  miracu- 
lous power;  they  testified  to  his  eternal  pre-ex- 
istence,  and  his  ascension  to  his  former  glory. 
With  this  the  earliest  teachers  of  the  Church 
were  content.  When  they  asserted  that  Christ 
was  uboth  human  and  divine,  born  and  unborn, 
God  in  the  flesh,  life  in  death,  born  of  Mary 


32  Is   Jesus    God? 

and  born  of  God,"  they  entered  into  no  further 
speculation  on  the  point.  This  could  not,  how- 
ever, always  remain  so.  The  doctrine  of 
Christ's  deity  was  openly  attacked.  The  first 
to  deny  it  were  the  Ebionites,  the  Nazarenes, 
the  followers  of  Artemon,  and  the  Alogi. 
The  earliest  of  these  were  the  Jewish-Chris- 
tian Ebionites.  To  them  Jesus  was  simply  a 
man  on  whom  for  his  piety  the  Spirit  of  God 
descended  at  his  baptism,  qualifying  him  for 
the  Messiahship.  But  they  remained  merely 
a  sect  and  disappeared  about  the  fifth  century. 
To  their  denials  the  orthodox  fathers,  the  lead- 
ers of  the  Christian  Church,  among  other 
things  opposed  the  declaration  of  John  that 
the  Logos  became  flesh.  But  as  was  natural, 
their  opinions  were  as  yet  somewhat  vague  and 
even  in  some  instances  erroneous.  Moreover, 
we  have  to  remember  that  the  course  of  his- 
toric development  in  Theology  is  from  popu- 
lar statement  to  scientific  statement.  Their 
individual  insight  was  not  sufficient  to  enable 
them  to  arrive  at  those  careful  scholastic  defin- 
itions to  which  the  Church  was  guided  by  the 
collective  wisdom  of  ecumenical  councils  after 
periods  of  long  and  painful  conflict.    Jerome 


Is   Jesus    God?  33 

says:  "It  may  be  that  they  erred  in  simplicity 
and  that  they  wrote  in  another  sense  or  that 
their  writings  were  gradually  corrupted  by  un- 
skillful transcribers,  and  certainly  before 
Arius  was  born  they  made  statements  incau- 
tiously which  are  open  to  the  misrepresenta- 
tions of  the  perverse." 

The  doctrine  of  the  Church  has,  in  all  its 
stages  of  development,  been  accompanied  by 
rationalistic  hesitation  and  in  the  third  century 
the  Church  was  once  more  called  upon  to  up- 
hold the  eternal  deity  of  Christ.  This  move- 
ment was  the  rationalistic  Monarchianism 
which  found  its  full  development  in  Paul  of 
Samosata.  He  held  that  Christ  was  a  mere 
man,  was  from  below,  and  from  man  became 
God.  This  view  the  Church  decidedly  reject- 
ed and  Paul's  views  were  condemned  at  a 
Synod  held  in  269  A.D.  But  the  Monarchian 
controversies  in  the  third  century  were  but 
preludes  to  the  great  struggle  of  the  Arian 
controversy  in  the  fourth  century.  The  Ante- 
Nicene  Christology  although  passing  through 
many  abstractions,  loose  statements,  uncertain 
conjectures  and  speculations,  nevertheless  in 
its  main  current  flowed  steadily  towards  the 


34  Is   Jesus    God? 

Nicene  statements,  and  this  the  Arian  struggle 
fully  brought  out.  The  doctrine  that  the 
Church  contended  for  in  this  great  strife,  al- 
though not  theologically  formulated,  lay  in 
the  faith  of  the  Church  from  the  very  begin- 
ning as  involved  in  its  confession.  The  aim 
of  those  who  defended  the  Church  doctrines 
was  the  defence  of  the  vital  points  of  the  faith 
and  not  a  mere  strife  about  words,  as  some  of 
her  opponents  would  contend.  Their  appeal 
was  always  to  Scripture  and  to  continuous  tra- 
dition. "The  Little  Labyrinth,"  for  example, 
written  at  the  commencement  of  the  third  cen- 
tury, in  refuting  the  Unitarians  of  its  day — 
the  Artemonites — makes  its  appeal  to  Scrip- 
ture, to  the  teaching  of  earlier  writings,  to 
Christian  psalms  and  hymns.  "Perchance," 
it  says,  "what  they  allege  might  be  credible 
were  it  not  that  the  divine  Scriptures  contradict 
them.  *  *  *  For  who  knows  not  the  works  of 
Irenaeus  and  Melito  and  the  rest  in  which 
Christ  is  announced  as  God  and  man?  What- 
ever psalms  and  hymns  were  written  by  the 
faithful  brethren,  from  the  beginning  cele- 
brate Christ  as  the  Word  of  God,  asserting 
his  divinity."    The  opinions  of  Arius  were 


Is   Jesus   God?  35 

condemned  by  a  council  held  at  Alexandria,  but 
this  only  brought  about  a  greater  controversy 
and  soon  the  whole  Christian  Church  was  in- 
volved in  the  strife.  Constantine  tried  by  his 
individual  efforts  to  settle  the  dispute,  but 
when  this  failed  he  summoned  a  council  of  the 
whole  Christian  world  to  decide  the  matter. 
The  struggle  brought  clearly  out  certain  ten- 
dencies working  in  the  Church  and  compelled 
the  Church  formally  to  reject  them  and  de- 
clare in  living  form  its  belief  in  the  eternal 
Godhead  of  Christ. 

The  Arian  heresy  denied  the  strict  deity  of 
Christ,  that  is  his  co-equality  with  the  Father, 
and  taught  that  he  is  a  subordinate  divinity, 
different  in  essence  from  God  (heteroousios), 
pre-existing  before  the  world  yet  not  eternal, 
for  there  was  a  time  when  he  was  not.  He 
was  himself  a  creature  of  the  will  of  God, 
made  out  of  nothing,  who  created  the  present 
world  and  became  incarnate  for  our  salvation. 
In  other  words,  the  Arians  were  creature-wor- 
shippers, no  less  than  the  heathen.  Another 
party,  the  semi-Arians,  held  a  middle  ground 
between  the  orthodox  and  Arian  views  and 
asserted  the  "homoiousia"  or  similarity  of  es- 


36  Is   Jesus    God? 

sence  of  the  Son  with  the  Father.  This  was  a 
very  elastic  term  and  might  be  contracted  into 
an  Arian  or  stretched  into  an  orthodox  sense 
according  to  the  tendency  of  the  man  who  held 
it.  Athanasius  the  father  of  orthodoxy  and 
the  three  Cappadocian  fathers,  Basil,  Gregory 
of  Nazianzus,  and  Gregory  of  Nyssa,  de- 
fended the  homoousia — the  essential  oneness 
of  the  Son  with  the  Father,  or  in  short  his 
eternal  divinity,  as  the  cornerstone  of  the 
whole  Christian  religion.  The  question  which 
Athanasius  and  his  party  contended  for  was  in 
the  words  of  Harnack,  "Is  the  divine  being 
who  has  appeared  on  the  earth  and  has  united 
man  with  God,  identical  with  the  highest  being 
who  rules  heaven  and  earth,  or  is  he  a  half 
divine  being?"  That  was  the  decisive  ques- 
tion in  the  Arian  controversy. 

We  should  remember  that  what  the  Church 
asserted  here  as  its  belief  was  not  something 
new,  but  what  had  always  been  the  faith  of  the 
Church.  Athanasius  always  appealed  to  the 
collective  testimony  of  the  Church  in  support 
of  the  doctrine  he  was  defending.  Bishop 
Alexander  too  says  that  he  was  "conscious 
that  he  was  contending  for  nothing  less  than 


Is   Jesus    God?  37 

the  divinity  of  Christ,  the  universal  faith  of 
the  Church."  This  doctrine  triumphed  in  the 
councils  of  Nice  in  325  and  Constantinople 
in  381,  and  since  then  it  has  stood  the  test  of 
the  ages  and  has  in  essence  been  incorporated 
into  all  the  great  creeds  of  the  Christian 
Church.  It  is  thus  expressed  in  the  Nicene 
Creed:  "We  believe  in  one  Lord,  Jesus 
Christ,  the  only  begotten  Son  of  God,  begotten 
of  the  Father  before  all  worlds,  God  of  God, 
Light  of  Light,  very  God  of  very  God,  begot- 
ten, not  made,  being  of  one  substance  with 
the  Father,  by  whom  all  things  were  made, 
who  for  us  men  and  for  our  salvation  came 
down  from  heaven  and  was  incarnate  by  the 
Holy  Ghost  of  the  Virgin  Mary,"  etc. 

Looking  back  at  the  result,  we  see  that  the 
relation  of  Nice  to  the  teaching  of  the  apos- 
tles and  evangelists  is  that  of  an  exact  equiva- 
lent translation  of  the  language  of  one  intel- 
lectual period  into  that  of  another.  The  New 
Testament  writings  had  taught  that  Jesus 
Christ  is  Lord  of  nature,  of  men,  of  heaven, 
of  the  spiritual  world  and  the  like.  When 
therefore  the  question  was  raised  whether 
Jesus  Christ  was  or  was  not  of  one  substance 


38  Is   Jesus    God? 

with  the  Father,  it  became  evident  that  of  two 
courses  one  must  be  chosen.  Either  an  affirm- 
ative answer  had  to  be  given  or  the  New 
Testament  teachings  had  in  some  way  to  be 
explained  away.  The  Nicene  fathers  only  af- 
firmed in  the  philosophical  language  of  the 
fourth  century  what  Jesus  and  the  apostles  had 
taught  in  the  popular  dialects  of  the  first  cen- 
tury. They  by  no  means  enlarged  it.  The 
Nicene  council  did  not  vote  a  new  honor  to 
Christ  which  he  had  not  before  possessed. 
They  objected  to  Arianism,  that  it  was  some- 
thing entirely  new.  Thus  the  Church  defined 
the  limits  of  Catholic  orthodoxy;  and  later 
ecumenical  councils  confirmed  these  decisions 
and  for  a  long  time  no  controversies  arose  on 
this  subject.  During  a  period  of  fifteen  cen- 
turies no  large  number  of  real  believers  in 
Christ's  divinity  have  objected  to  the  Nicene 
statement.  The  Church  of  the  middle  ages 
confined  itself  to  a  defence  of  the  Nicene  doc- 
trine and  the  strict  emphasis  laid  on  his  divin- 
ity throughout  the  middle  ages  has  been  con- 
tinued in  the  churches  of  the  Reformation. 

In    conclusion,    we    note    two   movements 
which  have  strongly  denied  the  deity  of  Christ 


Is  Jesus   God?  39 

in  more  recent  times.  They  have  affected  the 
Church  as  a  whole  very  little.  When  the 
doctrine  of  the  Church  has  been  attacked  in 
this  respect  there  have  always  been  men  who 
have  ably  defended  the  eternal  Godhead 
of  Christ   as   laid   down   at  the   Council  of 

Nice. 

The  first  of  these  movements  is  Unitarian- 
ism,  and  here  the  words  of  Shedd  will  suf- 
fice: "It  was  a  less  profound  form  of  error 
than  Sabellianism  and  Arianism  which  in  the 
first  centuries  had  compelled  the  theologian 
to  employ  his  most  extensive  learning  and  his 
subtlest  thinking.  As  a  consequence  it  has 
been  and  is  still  confined  to  but  a  very  small 
portion  of  the  Protestant  world.  Had  Uni- 
tarianism  adopted  into  its  conception  of  Christ 
those  more  elevated  views  of  his  nature  and 
person  which  clung  to  Sabellianism  and  even 
to  Arianism,  it  would  have  been  a  more  influ- 
ential system.  But  merely  reproducing  the 
low  humanitarian  view  of  Christ  which  we 
found  in  the  third  class  of  Anti-Trinitarians 
of  the  second  and  third  centuries,  the  Unitar- 
ian Christ  possessed  nothing  that  could  lift  the 
mind  above  the  sphere  of  the  merely  human 


40  Is   Jesus   God? 

and  nothing  that  could  inspire  the  religious  af- 
fections of  veneration  and  worship." 

The  second  movement  is  the  somewhat  indi- 
rect attack  on  the  divinity  of  Jesus  made  in 
several  Lives  of  Christ.  We  mention  only 
two, — Renan  and  Strauss.  Strauss  in  his 
Leben  Jesu  regarded  Jesus  as  merely  "the 
idea  of  the  identity  of  God  and  man  and  the 
mission  of  humanity  built  upon  Messianic 
promise."  Renan  entirely  abandoned  Christ's 
divinity  and  while  speaking  of  him  as  one 
whom  his  death  had  made  divine,  treated  him 
from  the  viewpoint  of  an  amiable  Rabbi. 
These  denials  provoked  strong  reaction.  Men 
like  Neander,  Ebrard,  Lange,  ably  defended 
the  truth  of  the  Christian  confession  on  this 
point.  But  the  great  masses  of  people  in  the 
Christian  Church  were  left  untouched  by  these 
attacks;  they  only  made  men  who  had  found 
in  Christ  a  Saviour  indeed  love  the  old  faith 
better,  and  with  increased  fervor  respect 
Peter's  great  confession,  "Thou  art  the  Christ, 
the  Son  of  the  living  God." 

The  times  demand  of  us  a  vigorous  reasser- 
tion  of  those  fundamental  truths  of  the  Church 
which  are  likewise  the  very  foundation  of  the 


Is   Jesus    God?  41 

gospel  system.    We  close  with  the  words  of 
John  Stock:  "The  mythical  account  of  Strauss1 
Leben  Jesu,  the  unreal  and  unromantic  Christ 
of  Renan's  Vie  de  Jesus,  and  even  the  merely 
human  Christ  of  Ecce  Homo  can  never  work 
any  deliverance  in  the  earth.    Such  a  Messiah 
does  not  meet  the  yearnings  of  fallen  human 
nature.    It  does  not  answer  the  pressing  query, 
'How  can  man  be  just  with  God?'     It  sup- 
plies no  effective  or  sufficient  agency  for  the 
regeneration  of  man's  moral  powers.     It  does 
not  bring  God  down  to  us  in  our  nature.   Such 
a  Christ  we  may  criticise  and  admire  as  we 
would  Socrates,  or  Plato,  or  Milton,  or  Shake- 
speare, but  we  cannot  trust  him  with  our  salva- 
tion, we  cannot  love  him  with  all  our  hearts, 
we  cannot  pour  forth  at  his  feet  the  homage 
of  our  whole  being,  for  to  do  so  would  be 
idolatry.    A  so-called  savior  whose  only  power 
to  save  lies  in  the  excellent  moral  precepts 
which  he  gave  and  the  pure  life  which  he 
lived,  who  is  no  longer  the  God-man  hut  a 
mere-man,  whose  blood  had  no  sacrificial  aton- 
ing or  propitiatory  power  in  the  moral  govern- 
ment of  Jehovah,  but  was  simply  a  martyr's 
witness  to  a  superior  system  of  ethics,  is  not 


42  Is   Jesus   God? 

the  Saviour  of  the  four  Gospels  or  of  Paul  or 
Peter  or  John.  It  is  not  under  the  banners 
of  such  a  Messiah  that  the  Church  of  God  has 
achieved  its  triumphs.  The  Christ  of  the  New 
Testament,  of  the  early  Church,  of  universal 
Christendom,  the  Christ  the  power  of  whose 
name  has  revolutionized  the  world  and  raised 
it  to  its  present  level  and  under  whose  guidance 
the  sacramental  hosts  of  God's  redeemed  are 
advancing  and  shall  advance  to  yet  greater 
victories  over  superstition  and  sin,  is  Im- 
manuel,  God-with-us,  in  our  nature,  whose 
blood  cleanseth  from  all  sin,  and  who  is  able 
to  save  even  to  the  uttermost  all  who  come 
unto  God  through  Him." 


DO  THE  NEW  TESTAMENT  WRIT- 
ERS TEACH  THE  DEITY 
OF  CHRIST? 

By  Harm  Henry  Meeter. 

In  order  to  prove  that  the  New  Testament 
writers  teach  the  deity,  or  in  other  words,  the 
Godhead  of  Christ,  it  is  not  absolutely  neces- 
sary to  quote  from  each  New  Testament 
book.  For,  certain  writers  being  authors  of 
two  or  more  books,  testimony  taken  from  the 
fourth  Gospel,  for  example,  will  prove  that  the 
writer  of  John's  Epistles  taught  Christ's 
deity;  testimony  taken  from  the  third  Gospel 
will  prove  that  the  author  of  Acts  taught  it, 
etc. 

There  may  be  some  question  as  to  what  is 
meant  by  "teaching"  the  deity  of  Christ.  If 
that  be  understood  to  mean  that  the  New 
Testament  writers  purposed  to  make  clear  to 
their  readers  in  so  many  words  that  Christ  is 
God,  then  it  may  seriously  be  questioned 
whether  any  New  Testament  writer,  with  the 

43 


44  Is   Jesus    God? 

possible  exception  of  John, — who  mentions  it 
as  part  of  his  purpose, — taught  the  deity  of 
Christ.  For  in  the  very  few  passages  that  can 
at  all  be  said  to  approach  the  form  of  a  defin- 
ition of  Christ's  divine  nature,  for  example, 
Romans  ix.,  5  and  certain  passages  in  the 
first  chapter  of  Hebrews,  the  author  plainly 
aims,  not  at  a  definition  of  Christ's  deity,  but 
at  something  ulterior  to  that.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  term  "teach"  can  be  understood  to 
mean  that  the  writings  of  the  New  Testament 
embody  certain  statements,  from  which  by 
logical  conclusion  it  follows  that  the  writers 
themselves  held  Christ  to  be  God.  In  this 
latter  sense,  I  assume  the  term  to  be  meant 
here.  If  it  is  taken  in  this  sense,  then  there 
is  an  abundance  of  evidence  to  prove  that  they 
all  held  Christ  to  be  God,  that  they  could  not 
have  said  what  they  did  say  had  they  not  held 
the  deity  of  Christ,  that  the  deity  of  Christ  as 
a  tenet  was  interwoven  with  the  very  warp 
and  woof  of  their  religious  teachings,  funda- 
mental to  them,  in  fact  a  presupposition  from 
which  all  started  out. 

To  begin  with,  there  are  passages  in  the 
New  Testament  that  in  one  way  or  another 


Is   Jesus    God?  45 

directly  ascribe  deity  to  Christ.  Thus  it  is 
plain  that  the  Synoptists — which  we  treat  to- 
gether because  it  is  generally  conceded  that 
they  are  in  general  harmony  as  to  the  portrait 
they  give  of  Jesus — hold  the  deity  of  Christ, 
from  the  fact  that  they  record  God  the  Father 
as  saying  at  Christ's  baptism :  "Thou  art  my 
Son  in  whom  I  am  well  pleased"  (Matt,  iii., 
17 ;  Mark  i.,  11;  Luke  iii.,  22)  ;  and  again  on 
the  Mount  of  Transfiguration:  "This  is  my 
beloved  Son,  hear  him"  (Mark  ix.,  7;  Luke 
ix.,  35).  That  it  is  the  metaphysical  Sonship 
which  is  here  witnessed  to  is  plain  from  the 
statements  made  in  the  same  connection.  The 
Holy  Spirit  and  the  Father  are  associated  with 
Christ  at  baptism.  Of  Christ  it  is  said :  "This 
is  my  Son,"  obviously  in  contradistinction  to 
all  others,  God's  "beloved  One,"  the  One  "in 
whom  God  is  well  pleased,"  and  men  are  ad- 
monished to  "hear  him."  Again,  a  belief  in 
Christ's  deity  is  evident  from  the  numerous 
passages  recorded  by  the  Synoptists,  where 
Jesus  speaks  of  God,  not  as  our  Father,  but 
specifically  as  "my  Father,"  indicating  a 
unique  relation  in  which  he  stood  to  God.  Es- 
pecially  is   this  plain   from   the  passage   in 


46  Is    Jesus    God? 

Matthew  xi.,  27,  and  the  parallel  one  in  Luke 
x.,  22,  which  places  Christ  on  an  equality  with 
God  the  Father:  "All  things  are  delivered 
unto  me  of  my  Father,  and  no  man  knoweth 
the  Son  but  the  Father;  neither  knoweth  any 
man  the  Father  save  the  Son,  and  he  to  whom- 
soever the  Son  will  reveal  Him."  It  is  need- 
less to  say  that,  when  the  Evangelists  speak 
of  God  the  Father's  testimony,  or  of  Christ's 
testimony  to  his  own  deity,  they  silently  sub- 
scribe to  that  testimony  as  embodying  their 
own  opinion. 

John  opens  his  Gospel  with  a  direct  testi- 
mony to  the  deity  of  Christ,  for  he  begins  by 
saying:  "In  the  beginning  was  the  Word,  and 
the  Word  was  with  God,  and  the  Word  was 
God."  In  fact,  if  we  may  take  John  at  his 
word,  his  whole  Gospel  (chap,  xx.,  21),  and 
his  First  Epistle  as  well  ( I.  John  v.,  13),  were 
written  with  the  purpose  that  his  readers 
might  believe  "that  Jesus  is  the  Christ,  the 
(metaphysical)  Son  of  God."  And  this  state- 
ment regarding  his  purpose  is  borne  out  in  the 
whole  of  the  Gospel  and  of  the  First  Epistle, 
by  the  titles  given  to  Christ.  Such  are,  for  ex- 
ample, "Son,"  "the  Only  Begotten,"  "the  Son 


Is   Jesus   God?  47 

of  God,"  the  One  "who  is  in  the  bosom  of  the 
Father."  John's  belief  in  Christ's  deity  is 
further  plain  from  passages  where  Christ's 
oneness  with  the  Father  is  emphasized.  Sig- 
nificant here  is  the  criticism  of  the  Jews  (x., 
33)  in  regard  to  Jesus'  calling  God  his 
Father.  When  Jesus  asserted  that  he  and  the 
Father  are  one,  the  Jews  sought  to  stone 
him,  and  they  gave  as  a  reason  that  they 
stoned  him  not  for  any  good  work,  but  be- 
cause of  blasphemy,  whereas  he,  being  a  man, 
made  himself  God.  This  statement  is  a  plain 
proof  of  how  the  Jews,  how  the  men  of 
Christ's  time,  and  of  how  the  Evangelists 
conceived  of  it,  when  Jesus  spoke  of  God  as 
specifically  his  Father.  No  other  interpreta- 
tion can  be  given  than  that  they  conceived  of 
him  as  divine,  as  God. 

This  direct  testimony  to  the  deity  of  Christ, 
taken  from  the  Gospels,  is  strengthened  by 
statements  found  in  Paul's  writings.  Of  these 
we  can  mention  but  a  few. 

In  Romans  viii.,  32,  we  read  that  "God 
spared  not  His  own  Son,  but  delivered  him 
up  for  us  all."  Obviously  here  the  Son,  as 
well  as  God,  stands  outside  the  category  of 


48  Is   Jesus    God? 

human  beings,  for  the  Son  was  delivered  up 
for  them.  And  the  word  "own  Son,"  which  is 
here  used  for  the  sake  of  emphasis,  shows 
Christ's  unique  and  close  relation  to  God, 
which,  considering  Paul's  strict  monotheistic 
conception  of  God,  cannot  mean  anything 
else  than  that  Jesus  Christ  is  identical  with 
God. 

So  also  Romans  ix.,  5,  seems  decisive  evi- 
dence that  Paul  teaches  Christ's  deity.  It  is 
just  because  this  passage  seemed  to  contain 
such  decisive  proof  of  Christ's  deity,  that 
some  recent  critics  have  gratuitously  attacked 
the  authenticity  of  the  text.  And  all  attempt 
to  explain  the  relative  clause  uwho  is  God 
over  all"  in  any  other  way  than  by  referring 
it  to  Christ  must  prove  futile.  The  context 
demands  its  reference  to  Christ,  since  Christ 
is  spoken  of  in  the  immediate  connection,  and 
it  is  only  natural  that,  in  reading  this  clause, 
we  should  think  of  him;  moreover,  the  words 
"according  to  the  flesh,"  which  immediately 
precede,  lead  us  to  expect  some  description  of 
the  other  side  of  Christ's  person;  and  besides 
there  would  be  no  sense  in  inserting  a  dox- 
ology  in  praise  of  God  the  Father  at  this 


Is   Jesus    God?  49 

point.  Therefore  these  words  must  refer  to 
Christ. 

Philippians  ii.,  6,  is  no  less  conclusive  proof 
of  how  Paul  conceived  of  Christ.  We  read 
there:  "Who,  being  in  the  form  of  God, 
thought  it  not  robbery  to  be  equal  with  God. 
.  .  .  "  And  "form"  here  can  imply  nothing 
less  than  that  he  possessed  the  whole  of  the 
qualities  which  constitute  God.  Only  so  ex- 
plained can  it  have  meaning  that  because 
Christ  was  in  the  form  of  God,  he  did  not 
need  to  think  it  robbery  to  be  equal  with  God. 
And  so  conceived  this  passage  leaves  no  room 
to  doubt  that  Paul  thought  Christ  divine. 

Of  the  many  proof-texts  in  Hebrews  I  will 
cite  merely  one.  In  i.,  8,  the  writer,  quot- 
ing an  Old  Testament  passage,  ascribes  deity 
to  the  Son  by  saying:  "Unto  the  Son  he 
saith:   'Thy  throne,   O   God,   is  forever  and 


ever.1  " 


Peter  likewise  ascribes  deity  to  Christ, 
when,  in  his  great  speech  in  Acts  ii.,  34,  he 
says:  "For  David  is  not  ascended  into  the 
heavens,  but  he  saith  himself:  'The  Lord  said 
unto  my  Lord:  Sit  thou  on  my  right  hand 
until  I  make  thy  foes  thy  footstool.'  "    Here 


50  Is   Jesus    God? 

Peter  quotes  the  same  Old  Testament  passage 
to  which  Christ  had  reference  when  he 
proved  to  the  Jews  the  deity  of  the  Messiah. 
It  admits  of  no  doubt,  therefore,  it  seems  to 
me,  that  Peter,  in  appropriating  that  text  as 
embodying  his  own  opinion,  meant  to  ascribe 
deity  to  Christ.  So  also  in  the  tenth  chapter 
of  Acts,  verse  36,  Peter  calls  Christ  "Lord  of 
all."  This  he  could  not  say  if  he  did  not  think 
Christ  divine. 

In  James  and  Jude,  epistles  themselves 
short,  the  passages  which  point  to  the  deity  of 
Christ  are  necessarily  few.  But  even  there  it 
seems  to  allow  of  no  doubt  that  Christ  was 
conceived  of  as  divine.  In  the  opening  verses 
of  his  epistle  James,  in  styling  himself  "a 
servant  of  God  and  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ,"  by 
coordinating  these  two,  places  Christ  on  an 
equality  with  God.  And,  speaking  in  chapter 
ii.  of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  he  calls  him  uthe 
Lord  of  glory."  The  idea  of  the  term  glory  is 
not  merely  to  attribute  glory  to  Christ,  for 
glory,  placed  in  apposition  to  Christ,  signifies 
rather  Christ,  whose  being  consists  in  glory. 
Now  such  can  with  difficulty  be  said  of  Christ 
without  accounting  him  to  be  God  himself. 


Is   Jesus   God?  51 

In  like  manner  the  epistle  of  Jude  contains  a 
passage  which,  although  it  does  not  directly 
call  Jesus  God,  yet  presupposes  it.  We  read 
in  the  fourth  verse:  "Our  only  Master  and 
Lord  Jesus  Christ."  The  word  only  is  sig- 
nificant. If  Jesus  Christ  is  our  only  Master 
(Despot),  then  to  the  Jewish  mind  of  Jude, 
Christ  must  be  God,  for  in  the  end  God  was 
the  only  Master  whom  a  Jew  could  recognize. 

From  this  review  of  the  New  Testament 
writings  it  appears  that  each  of  the  New 
Testament  writers,  in  some  form  or  other, 
directly  ascribes  deity  to  Christ.  Numerous 
other  texts  might  have  been  cited  as  corrob- 
orative testimony.  But  this  evidence,  gained 
from  passages  in  which  deity  is  directly  as- 
cribed to  Christ,  can  only  be  subsidiary.  For 
there  is  far  stronger  evidence  in  other  facts 
recorded  in  the  New  Testament;  besides  the 
interpretation  of  even  the  strongest  passages 
directly  ascribing  deity  to  Christ  is  always 
subject  to  debate,  the  critics  who  are  not  will- 
ing to  concede  Godhead  to  Christ  interpreting 
them  in  their  own  way. 

Further  proof  of  Christ's  deity  I  find  then, 
first,  in  the  divine  attributes  ascribed  to  him. 


52  Is   Jesus    God? 

We  have  an  epitome  in  Colossians  ii.,  9.   Paul 
says:  "In  him  dwelleth  all  the  fulness  of  the 
Godhead  bodily."    Christ  is  said  to  be  eternal 
as  God.     John  says:  "In  the  beginning  was 
the  Word  and  the  Word  was  with  God,  and 
the  Word  was  God."    Christ  to  him  was  "the 
Alpha  and  Omega,  the    Beginning  and    the 
End."     "Before  Abraham  was,   Christ  is." 
To  Paul  Christ,  who  had  lived  and  died  at 
Jerusalem,  is  "the  first-born  of  every  creature." 
To  the  author  of  Hebrews,  "Jesus  Christ  is 
the  same  yesterday,  today,  and  forever."     So 
too  Christ  is  omnipresent.    To  John,  though 
he  is  walking  on  the  earth,  yet  he  is  "in  the 
bosom  of  the  Father."     He  is  the  "Son  of 
Man,  which  is  in    heaven."      To    Matthew, 
though  he  has  ascended  up  to  heaven,  Christ 
is  with  his  Church  "even  unto  the  end  of  the 
world."      To  Paul    (in    Ephesians  i.,   23,) 
Christ  "filleth  all  in  all."    Christ  is  unchange- 
able.   The  author  of  Hebrews  tells  us  that, 
though  heaven  and  earth  shall  wax  old  as  a 
garment,  Christ  will  remain  the  same.    Christ 
is  represented  as  omniscient.    The  Synoptists 
represent  him  as  knowing  what  is  in  the  heart 
of  man,  as  knowing  what  Peter  had  answered 


Is   Jesus   God?  53 

the  taxgatherers,  as  knowing  step  by  step  what 
his  life's  course  would  be.  Christ  is  all-power- 
ful. To  Paul  he  is  "the  Power  of  God  and 
the  Wisdom  of  God."  The  Evangelists  por- 
tray him  as  having  command  over  the  powers 
of  nature ;  the  sea  and  the  winds  are  under  his 
control. 

Another  proof  of  his  deity  is  the  part  he 
is  said  to  take  in  the  divine  works.  He  takes 
part  in  the  work  of  creation.  According  to 
John,  "all  things  were  created  by  him."  Paul 
calls  him  "the  beginning  of  the  creation  of 
God."  He  participates  in  the  work  of  Prov- 
idence. For,  according  to  Colossians  i.,  17, 
"by  him  all  things  consist."  According  to 
Hebrews  i.,  3,  "he  upholds  all  things  by  the 
word  of  his  power."  His  wonders  even  are 
expressive  of  his  deity;  for,  unlike  the  proph- 
ets, who  also  performed  wonders,  Christ  per- 
formed them  in  imitation  of  the  Father  (John 
v.,  21),  "For  as  the  Father  raiseth  up  from 
the  dead  and  quickeneth,  even  so  the  Son 
quickeneth  whom  he  will."  Christ,  while  on 
earth,  forgave  sins.  And  "who  can  forgive 
sins  but  God  alone?"  He  shall  come,  accord- 
ing to  the  Evangelists  and  II.  Peter,  to  judge 


54  Is   Jesus    God? 

the  world  as  its  Lord,  which  he  could  not  do 
if  he  stood  not  to  it  in  the  relation  of  Creator 
to  creature. 

The  Evangelists,  Paul,  and  the  author  of 
the  Hebrews  make  him  the  direct  object  of 
the  Christian's  prayer.  This  they  could  not 
do  if  they  thought  him  not  God,  for  only  in 
his  Godhead  can  we  find  ground  of  prayer 
unto  him.  Divine  honor  is  also  given  him  in 
making  him  the  object  of  the  Christian's  faith. 
In  John  xiv.,  I,  Jesus  tells  his  disciples  that, 
as  they  believe  in  God,  so  also  they  shall  make 
him  the  object  of  their  faith,  or,  as  some 
would  have  it,  Jesus  tells  them  he  is  the  ob- 
ject of  their  faith  just  as  God  is.  And  of  this 
faith  in  Jesus  Christ  almost  all  the  New 
Testament  writers  speak.  In  so  doing  they 
give  testimony  to  the  deity  of  Christ.  Christ 
it  is  on  whom  Christians,  according  to  Peter 
and  Paul,  are  told  to  build  their  hope  for 
time  and  eternity.  From  him,  according  to 
Peter,  Paul,  John,  and  Jude,  Christians  ex- 
pect grace.  Now  how  were  this  possible  if 
Christ  were  mere  man,  exalted  to  heaven 
though  he  be?  What  grace  can  be  had  from 
the  saints  in  heaven,  from  Abraham  or  moth- 


Is   Jesus    God?  55 

er  Mary,  for  whom  connection  with  those  on 
this  earth  is  practically  severed? 

Again,  a  proof  of  Christ's  deity  is  the  active 
part  he  now  is  said  to  take  in  the  work  of 
salvation.  The  mystical  union  of  believers 
with  Christ,  symbolized  by  the  figure  of  the 
vine  and  the  branches  in  John  xv.,  and  so 
often  spoken  of  in  Paul's  epistles,  implies  as  a 
necessary  presupposition  that  Christ  is  divine, 
and  would  be  robbed  of  its  meaning  if  we, 
in  a  rationalistic  way,  understood  it  to  signify 
union  merely  with  Christ's  teachings.  John 
records  Jesus  as  saying  (John  xiv.,  23,)  that, 
if  any  man  love  Christ,  the  Father  and  he 
will  dwell  in  their  hearts.  Christ,  who  has 
died  and  departed  from  this  earth,  is  repre- 
sented in  Corinthians  (I.  i.,  4-9,  30,  31,  xv., 
45),  as  the  source  of  Spiritual  Life,  as  a  life- 
giving  Spirit.  He  is  said  in  Galatians  ii.,  20, 
to  dwell  in  us,  as  God  is  said  to  dwell  in  his 
people.  By  him  (Ephesians  ii.,  1-6)  we  are 
quickened  from  the  dead  to  spiritual  life;  and 
at  the  sound  of  his  voice,  as  Paul  has  it,  at 
the  last  day  all  men  will  be  called  forth  from 
the  grave.  Such  statements  cannot  be  made 
without  an  implication  of  Christ's  deity. 


$6  Is    Jesus    God? 

Finally,  Christ's  deity  is  reflected  in  the  life 
he  is  said  to  have  led.  Already  we  see  the 
deity  revealed  in  the  birth-narrative.  The 
story  of  Christ's  birth  is  not  that  of  a  natural, 
but  of  a  supernatural  person,  the  supernatural 
being  not  merely  implied  in  the  general  run 
of  the  narrative,  but  explicitly  stated.  When 
Luke  mentions  the  fact  of  the  angel's  foretell- 
ing to  Mary  that  she  was  to  be  with  child  of 
the  Holy  Ghost,  he  records  the  angel  as  say- 
ing: "For  this  reason  (*.  e.,  just  because  of 
the  parentage  of  God) ,  that  Holy  Thing 
which  shall  be  born  of  thee  shall  be  called  Son 
of  God."  The  passage  loses  all  its  force,  the 
reason  ceases  to  be  a  reason,  if  we  ascribe 
anything  less  than  deity  to  Christ. 

Matthew  records  the  angel  as  saying  that 
the  child  should  be  called  Immanuel,  God- 
with-us.  As  Matthew  speaks  of  this  in  con- 
nection with  the  wonderful  birth  of  Christ,  it 
can  scarcely  be  doubted  that  he  meant  to  as- 
cribe deity  to  Christ.  For  how  could  that 
child  in  itself  be  "God-with-us"  and  not  be 
divine?  This  statement  of  Matthew  has  the 
more  force  if  we  bear  in  mind  that  Matthew 
was  not  educated  in  the  doctrine  of  modern 


Is   Jesus    God?  57 

theology,  which  teaches  that  there  is  some- 
thing divine  in  each  of  us.  Again,  in  verse 
2 1  of  the  same  chapter,  the  angel  says :  "Thou 
shalt  call  his  name  Jesus,  for  he  shall  save  his 
people  from  their  sins."  The  angel  there  al- 
ludes to  a  statement  in  Psalm  cxxx.,  where  it 
is  said  that  God  should  redeem  Israel  from 
their  iniquities.  In  the  New  Testament  Jesus 
is  substituted  for  God,  which  fact  shows  that 
Jesus  was  conceived  of  here  as  God. 

Now  the  record  of  Christ's  birth  as  proof 
of  his  deity,  though  more  or  less  debatable  in 
so  far  as  the  Synoptic  record  is  concerned,  is 
fully  substantiated  by  the  testimony  given 
thereto  by  John.  In  the  opening  words  of  his 
Gospel  he  says  that  the  Word  which  is  God 
was  made  flesh  and  dwelt  among  us.  Paul,  in 
a  similar  passage  in  Galatians  iv.,  4,  says: 
"But  when  the  fulness  of  time  was  come,  God 
sent  forth  his  Son,  made  of  a  woman,"  there- 
by testifying  to  the  metaphysical  Sonship  of 
the  son  of  Mary. 

So  also  the  account  of  Christ's  life,  as  given 
by  the  four  Evangelists  in  common,  can  lead 
to  no  other  conclusion  than  that  they  con- 
ceived of  Christ  as  God.   "No  man  ever  lived 


58  Is   Jesus    God? 

as  he  lived;  no  man  ever  spoke  as  this  man 
spoke."  His  whole  life's  conduct,  from  the 
cradle  to  the  grave,  was  one  grand  reflection, 
not  merely  of  a  spotless  human  character,  but 
of  the  divine  in  him.  The  life  he  led,  the 
words  he  spoke,  the  wonders  he  did  in  imita- 
tion of  the  Father,  the  command  he  exercised 
over  the  forces  of  nature — all  show  we  are 
here  dealing  with  some  one  divine.  Christ 
cannot  be  a  creature  of  the  Evangelists'  fancy. 
He  cannot  be  a  product  of  their  imagination. 
It  lies  entirely  beyond  the  reach  of  possibility 
for  a  human  being  to  picture  from  imagina- 
tion the  life  of  a  divine  being.  The  Evangel- 
ists could  only  record  "the  things  which  they 
had  seen  and  heard."  That  the  writers  not 
merely  unconsciously  taught  Christ's  deity  in 
the  portrait  they  drew  of  his  life,  but  that 
they  themselves  were  impressed  by  the  fact 
that  Christ's  life  was  that  of  one  divine,  I 
think  is  evident  from  their  acquiescing  in  the 
opinion  of  Peter,  when  he  said,  concluding 
from  the  life  of  Christ:  "Thou  art  the  Christ, 
the  Son  of  the  living  God" ;  and  from  John's 
statement,  that  "these  things  were  written, 


Is   Jesus    God?  59 

that  ye  might  believe  that  Jesus  is  the  Christ, 
the  Son  of  the  living  God." 

In  like  manner  Christ's  death,  which  is  but 
the  culmination  of  his  godlike  life,  is  expres- 
sive of  his  deity.  Not  as  regards  that  death 
in  itself,  for  in  so  far  as  Christ  could  die  he 
was  not  God;  but  as  to  the  manner  in  which 
he  died.  This  already  is  plain  from  the  fact 
that  the  Evangelists  record  Jesus  as  saying 
that  he  had  power  to  lay  down  his  life  and 
power  to  take  it  up  again,  a  power  not  given 
to  man,  but  a  prerogative  only  of  him,  who  is 
Lord  of  Life.  And  Christ  laid  down  his  life. 
It  was  not  torn  from  him.  The  manner  in 
which  he  died,  and  the  circumstances  attend- 
ing, impressed  bystanders  so  with  a  feeling  of 
his  deity  that  the  Roman  centurion  exclaimed: 
"Truly,  this  was  a  Son  of  God."  This  state- 
ment has  worth  for  us  here,  not  so  much  as 
embodying  the  centurion's  belief,  for  he  could 
only  conceive  of  this  Son  of  God  after  his 
heathen  fashion,  but  for  what  Matthew  and 
Mark  wish  to  bring  out  by  it.  For  the  state- 
ment clearly  implies  that  what  to  the  writers 
was  a  fact  impressed  itself  as  such  even  upon 
the  mind  of  the  Roman  centurion. 


60  Is   Jesus    God? 

Christ's  resurrection  is  another  proof  of 
his  deity.  In  so  far  as  it  was  a  resurrection 
from  the  dead,  it  was  a  token  of  his  human- 
ity. But  especially  as  to  the  fact  that  God,  by 
raising  Christ  from  the  dead,  set  His  seal  to 
all  the  claims  Christ  during  life  had  made  to 
deity,  does  the  resurrection  testify  to  the  deity 
of  Christ.  In  this  manner  Paul  finds  in  the 
resurrection  a  proof  of  Christ's  deity,  when 
he  says  in  Romans  i.,  4:  "And  declared  to 
be  the  Son  of  God  with  power,  according  to 
the  Spirit  of  Holiness,  by  the  resurrection 
from  the  dead." 

From  these  facts  I  think  it  is  clear  that  the 
New  Testament  writers — all  of  them — teach 
the  deity  of  Christ,  that  they  could  not  have 
said  what  they  did  say  without  holding  the 
deity  of  Christ,  that  the  deity  of  Christ  was 
not  merely  an  object  of  belief  along  with 
many  others,  but  formed  part  of  the  sub- 
stratum upon  which  their  religious  teachings 
were  based,  was  a  presupposition  from  which 
they  all  started  out. 


DO  THE  EVANGELISTS  REPRESENT 
CHRIST  AS  HIMSELF  TEACH- 
ING HIS  DEITY? 

First  Essay. 

By  Johannes  Daniel  Roos. 

Our  question  at  once  clearly  marks  out  the 
field  of  our  investigation.  The  immediately 
preceding  paper  has  proved  that  the  mass  of 
the  New  Testament  writers  not  only  believed 
in  Christ  as  a  Divine  Person,  but  also  held  his 
divinity  as  a  fundamental  truth  which  pervad- 
ed their  minds  and  their  writings — both  ex- 
plicitly and  implicitly — in  the  portraits  they 
have  severally  drawn  of  him.  At  this  stage, 
however,  we  come  in  contact  with  modern 
criticism,  throwing  up  this  difficulty, — that  we 
cannot  receive  the  testimony  of  the  apostles  as 
an  unbiased  account,  and  indeed  not  even  that 
of  the  earlier  tradition,  on  which  their  ac- 
counts seem  partially  to  rest.  They  are  preju- 
diced in  all  they  have  to  say  about  Jesus,  inas- 

€1 


62  Is    Jesus    God? 

much  as  he  is  acknowledged  by  them  as  their 
Lord  and  Master,  and  is  believed  in  by  them 
as  divine. 

We  are  therefore  called  upon  to  distinguish 
between  what  these  apostles  teach  concerning 
Jesus,  and  what  he  himself  has  taught  about 
his  own  Person;  that  is,  in  the  Gospels  to  sift 
out  the  self-testimony  of  Jesus  from  the  repre- 
sentations given  of  him  by  his  followers  and 
devotees.  We  shall,  therefore,  in  the  Gospel 
narratives  turn  exclusively  to  the  words  of 
Jesus  himself,  and  hope  on  that  foundation  to 
prove  adequately  that  our  Lord  is  represented 
not  only  as  having  thought,  but  as  having  actu- 
ally taught,  that  he  was  the  Messiah,  the 
Christ,  the  Son  of  God,  yea,  himself  God,  in 
the  most  striking  and  clearest  terms.  The 
further  question,  whether  what  we  find  in 
these  words  laid  on  the  lips  of  Christ  is  actu- 
ally his  own,  or  merely  the  subjective  convic- 
tions of  the  evangelists  attributed  to  him,  falls 
beyond  our  range,  and  will  be  treated  subse- 
quently. 

Investigating  then  the  self-testimony  of 
Jesus,  as  recorded  by  the  evangelists,  we  find, 
as  a  first  step,  that  in  his  very  earliest  youth 


Is   Jesus    God?  63 

(Luke  ii.,  49), — the  only  reference  to  that 
period  of  his  life,  enveloped  in  the  mists  of 
the  mysteriously  unknown  and  silent,  we  have 
recorded  in  the  Gospels — he  is  clearly  con- 
scious of  his  unique  relation  to  God  as  his 
Father.  "Wist  ye  not,"  says  he,  "that  I  must 
be  about  my  Father's  business  ?"  It  is  hardly 
possible  that  at  such  an  early  age  he  could 
have  believed  himself  to  be  the  heaven-sent 
Son,  had  he  not  been  that  in  reality.  Accord- 
ingly we  find  him  opening  his  ministerial  activ- 
ities by  boldly  applying  to  himself  in  the  syna- 
gogue at  Nazareth  the  Messianic  prophecy  of 
Isaiah  lxi.,  1 ;  for  in  Luke  iv.,  17  sq.  we  read 
that  after  having  read  from  this  prophet  the 
passage :  "The  Spirit  of  the  Lord  is  upon  me, 
because  he  hath  anointed  me  to  preach  the  gos- 
pel to  the  poor;  he  hath  sent  me  to  heal  the 
broken-hearted,  to  preach  deliverance  to  the 
captives,  .  .  .  and  the  acceptable  year  of  the 
Lord,"  he  sat  down  and  uttered  these  solemn 
words:  "This  day  is  this  scripture  fulfilled  in 
your  ears."  Moreover,  not  long  after  this 
public  declaration  we  find  Jesus  at  the  well  of 
Sychar,  on  his  way  to  Galilee,  definitely  de- 
claring to  the  Samaritan  woman  that  he  is  the 


64  Is    Jesus    God? 

Messiah,  the  Christ,  when  to  the  inquiring 
woman  who  said:  "I  know  that  the  Messiah 
cometh,  which  is  called  Christ,"  Jesus  an- 
swered: "I  that  speak  unto  thee  am  he." 

But  by  way  of  a  stepping-stone  to  our  final 
resolution,  if  not  part  of  the  very  foundation 
of  the  argument  itself,  let  us  try  to  ascertain 
whether  our  Lord  made  any  claim  to  a  pre- 
existent  state,  whether  he  was  conscious  of  a 
life  beyond  the  soil  of  Palestine;  thus  working 
up  our  way  to  a  clear  conception  of  his  per- 
sonal oneness  with  the  Father.  Such  a  pre- 
existence  of  Christ  is  not  only  latent  in  most 
of  the  New  Testament  passages  having  refer- 
ence to  him,  but  is  also  explicitly  and  clearly 
taught  by  the  Saviour  himself.  In  the  first 
place  we  find  Jesus,  in  John  viii.,  teaching  be- 
fore his  countrymen  in  the  temple,  where  the 
indictment  of  the  Jews,  that  he  made  himself 
greater  than  Abraham  and  the  prophets,  drew 
from  his  lips  this  solemn  phrase:  "Verily,  ver- 
ily, I  say  unto  you,  before  Abraham  was  (lit. 
became)  I  am."  What  does  this  mean? 
Christ  professes  here  simple  existence,  without 
beginning  or  end.  Abraham  came  into  being 
at  some  definite  time  (he  became)  ;  our  Lord 


Is    Jesus    God?  6$ 

not  so,  he  is  from  eternity:  "I  am"  This  then 
claims  not  only  pre-existence,  but  also  dis- 
plays a  consciousness  of  eternal  Being.  The 
"I  am"  of  verse  24  seems  to  point  back  to  the 
Jehovah  of  the  Covenant  of  ancient  Israel: 
"I  am  that  I  am"  (Ex.  iii.,  14).  He  knows 
no  past  or  future,  he  is  the  eternal  now.  That 
this  is  the  plain  sense  of  the  words  is  perhaps 
further  evident  from  the  immediate  hostile 
attitude  of  the  Jews,  who  resolved  to  stone  him 
for  blasphemy. 

In  the  second  place  we  have  the  strongest 
of  testimonies  for  this  consciousness  of  a  prior 
state  of  glory  from  which  our  Lord  had  come, 
and  to  which  he  was  then  about  to  return,  in 
his  own  words  (John  xvii.,  5)  :  "And  now, 
O  Father,  glorify  thou  me  with  thine  own 
self,  with  the  glory  which  I  had  with  thee 
before  the  world  was."  So  clear  and  full  of 
solemn  import  is  this  reference  in  the  great  in- 
tercessory prayer  of  our  Saviour,  offered  up 
on  the  eve  of  his  crucifixion,  that  we  may  pass 
on  without  further  comment.  In  a  similar 
way,  had  space  permitted,  we  might  have  ad- 
duced numerous  other  texts,  e.  g.,  John  iii., 
13;  vi.,  62;  viii.,  23,  etc.,  all  bearing  on  this 


66  Is    Jesus    God? 

subject,  and  adding  weight  to  our  argument. 
But  these  few  concrete  instances  may  suffice. 
It  is  evident  that  this  is  a  truth  of  the  greatest 
moment,  for  if  it  be  denied,  "we  have  in  Jesus 
Christ  at  most  the  deification  of  the  human, 
not  the  incarnation  of  the  divine ;  man  become 
God,  not  God  become  man."  In  these  and 
similar  sayings  of  Jesus,  then,  adequate  evi- 
dence is  supplied  for  his  pre-existence.  In 
the  words  of  King  we  say:  "Indeed  the  evi- 
dence of  this  truth  is  not  confined  to  them 
alone,  it  is  forthcoming  in  the  general  tenor 
of  his  teaching  respecting  himself.  Even 
when  we  do  not  hear  his  direct  testimony  to 
his  pre-existent  glory,  we  overhear  it.  He 
who  claims  an  absolute  and  exclusive  knowl- 
edge of  the  Father,  who  speaks  on  all  matters 
of  highest  moment  with  an  authority  which 
no  one  is  permitted  to  question,  who  makes 
the  acceptance  or  rejection  of  himself  the 
hinge  on  which  the  destiny  of  men  turns,  and 
who  presents  himself  as  the  final  judge  of 
mankind,  cannot,  we  instinctively  feel,  have 
an  existence  which  reaches  no  further  back 
than  Bethlehem.  In  him  there  must  be,  there 
is,  the  appearance  of  the  eternal  in  time."    It 


Is   Jesus    God?  67 

is  to  be  admitted,  of  course,  that  pre-existence 
is  not  necessarily  deity.  On  the  contrary,  some 
acknowledge  Christ's  pre-existence,  and  yet 
deny  his  true  and  proper  Godhead.  But  this 
raises  such  grave  difficulties  that  the  position 
is  today  generally  abandoned;  and  modern 
theologians  are  aware  that,  to  vindicate  their 
naturalistic  view  of  his  Person,  they  are 
obliged  to  make  his  existence  begin  with  the 
nativity  in  Bethlehem. 

We  go  a  step  further,  then,  trying  to  prove 
that  Christ  also  considered  himself  essentially 
one  with  the  Father.  For  this  we  think  we 
find  ample  ground  in  our  Lord's  words  record- 
ed in  John  viii.,  42 :  "I  proceeded  forth  and 
came  from  (lit.  out  of)  God."  This  expres- 
sion, presupposing  the  pre-existence,  seems, 
almost  beyond  doubt,  to  express  his  rela- 
tionship to  the  Father  in  such  a  manner  as 
to  be  explicable  only  in  terms  of  his  true 
and  proper  Godhead.  For  on  closer  exami- 
nation it  will  be  seen  that  the  preposition 
used  in  the  original,  "with  God"  is  not  that 
meaning  "from  the  side  of,"  nor  yet  "away 
from,"  but  that  meaning  "out  of,"  which 
can  only  mean  out  of  God  as  the  origin.    The 


68  Is   Jesus    God? 

relation  is  therefore  a  highly  metaphysical 
one.  The  explanation  placed  on  these  words 
by  Bishop  Westcott  is  this:  they  "can  only  be 
interpreted  of  the  true  divinity  of  the  Son,  of 
which  the  Father  is  the  source  and  fountain." 
Again  in  John  x.,  30,  Christ  declares:  "I  and 
the  Father  are  one"  where,  in  view  of  his  pre- 
ceding argument,  this  can  only  mean  "one" 
in  the  guarantee  of  the  safety  of  the  sheep  be- 
longing to  his  fold,  thus  a  oneness  not  only  in 
the  ethical  sense,  but  a  oneness  of  power,  of 
nature.  Godet  says:  "Here  the  thought  of 
Jesus  rises  still  higher,  even  to  the  notion  of  a 
unity  of  nature,  whence  arises  unity  of  will, 
power,  and  property." 

The  data  thus  secured  seem  to  justify  us  in 
saying  that  Christ  is  both  a  distinct  pre-exist- 
ent  Personality,  and  substantially  one  with 
Deity.  As  such,  therefore,  being  himself  God, 
we  find  him  claiming  to  be  without  sin.  This 
claim  radiates  forth  from  the  whole  tenor  of 
his  teaching.  Compare  him,  for  example,  with 
his  predecessors :  they  all,  from  Moses  to  the 
latest  of  the  prophets,  confess  weakness,  short- 
comings, and  even  sins.  Or  with  his  successors, 
amongst  whom  we  find  Paul,  whom  so  many 


Is   Jesus    God?  69 

wish  to  exalt  even  above  Christ  himself,  ex- 
claiming: "O  wretched  man  that  I  am!  who 
shall  deliver  me  from  this  body  of  death?"  Of 
all  this  there  is  not  a  word,  not  even  the  slight- 
est trace,  in  the  teachings  of  Christ.  He  never 
even  so  much  as  hints  at  a  distinction  between 
his  official  and  his  personal  self.  Nay,  further, 
he  makes  morality  not  something  relative,  but 
absolute,  placing  before  his  hearers  the  highest 
possible,  the  perfect  standard:  "Be  ye  there- 
fore perfect,  even  as  your  Father  which  is  in 
heaven  is  perfect"  (Matt,  v.,  48).  Not  only, 
however,  is  our  Lord's  perfect  sinlessness  im- 
plicit in  his  words,  but  he  even  makes  a  direct 
and  explicit  claim  to  it,  when  in  John  viii.,  46, 
he  positively  challenges  the  Jews:  "Which  of 
you  convinceth  me  of  sin?" 

A  second  characteristic  is  not  less  strik- 
ing than  the  one  just  examined,  and  can 
perhaps  be  explained  only  from  his  sin- 
less nature,  to  wit,  the  attitude  of  superi- 
ority he  assumes  towards  the  Pharisees, 
the  Scribes,  the  Prophets,  the  hallowed  Jew- 
ish tradition,  and  even  the  inviolable  law  of 
Moses  itself.  The  Scribes  and  Rabbis  always 
appealed  to  prior  and  higher  authorities;  the 


70  Is   Jesus    God? 

prophetic  language  runs:  "Thus  saith  the 
Lord."  But  Jesus  assumes  all  authority  to  him- 
self, and  we  hear  him  speak  in  such  language 
as  this:  "Verily,  verily,  /  say  unto  you";  an 
attitude  to  be  compared  not  with  that  of 
Moses  or  any  of  the  prophets,  but  only  with 
that  of  God  himself.  Accordingly  we  find 
Christ  already  early  in  his  ministry  claiming 
the  power  of  forgiving  sins.  When  the  sick 
of  the  palsy  was  brought  into  his  presence,  he 
said  unto  him:  "Son,  be  of  good  cheer,  thy 
sins  are  forgiven  thee."  Nor  did  he  rest  con- 
tent with  the  mere  uttering  of  these  words,  to 
which  the  Scribes  took  objection,  accusing  him 
in  their  hearts  of  blasphemy.  In  the  most  em- 
phatic manner  he  asserts  this  power  of  forgiv- 
ing sins  and  cleansing  men's  hearts.  For  to 
their  unspoken  censure  he  answers:  "Whether 
is  easier,  to  say,  Thy  sins  are  forgiven;  or 
to  say,  Arise,  and  walk?  But  that  ye  may 
know  that  the  Son  of  Man  hath  power  on 
earth  to  forgive  sins  (then  saith  he  to  the  sick 
of  the  palsy),  Arise,  take  up  thy  bed  and  go 
unto  thy  house.  And  he  arose  and  departed 
to  his  house"   (Matt,  ix.,  2-7). 

But  the  culminating  declarations  of  Christ 


Is   Jesus    God?  71 

as  to  his  divine  sonship  perhaps  yet  remain  to 
be  adduced.  This  title,  the  Son  of  God,  be- 
comes, especially  in  John,  Jesus'  own  designa- 
tion, constantly  on  his  lips.  In  the  25th  verse 
of  chapter  v.  he  says :  "The  dead  shall  hear  the 
voice  of  the  Son  of  God,  and  shall  live."  In 
ix.,  35-7,  he  makes  the  most  direct  statement 
as  to  this.  Meeting  the  man  whose  sight  he 
had  restored,  and  whom  the  Jews  had  then 
cast  out,  he  asked  him:  "Dost  thou  believe  on 
the  Son  of  God  ?"  The  man  answered :  "Who 
is  he,  Lord?"  Whereupon  Jesus  replied: 
"Thou  hast  both  seen  him,  and  it  is  he  that 
talketh  with  thee."  There  are  many  more 
passages,  not  to  mention  those  in  which  our 
Lord  speaks  of  God  peculiarly  as  "the"  or 
"my"  Father,  never  "our"  Father,  thus  never 
placing  himself  alongside  of  the  disciples. 

But  this  designation  is  not  limited  to  John's 
Gospel,  as  some  critics  would  have  it.  The 
Synoptics  indeed  seem  to  strike  the  keynote 
here.  It  is  perhaps  met  with  in  its  fullest  sig- 
nificance in  Matt,  xi.,  27 — also  Luke  x.,  22, 
which  contains  the  same  pregnant  statement, 
only  slightly  changed  in  form — where  the  very 
germ  of  the  Incarnation-mystery  seems  to  be 


72  Is    Jesus    God? 

imbedded:  "All  things  are  delivered  unto  me 
of  my  Father,  and  no  man  knoweth  the  Son, 
but  the  Father;  neither  knoweth  any  man  the 
Father,  save  the  Son,  and  he  to  whomsoever 
the  Son  will  reveal  Him."  What  this  on  the 
face  of  it  teaches  is  a  complete  knowledge  of 
the  Son  by  the  Father,  and  of  the  Father  by 
the  Son.  The  Son  should  thus  be  infinite  in 
his  attributes  to  compass  the  boundless  depths 
of  the  Father.  The  mutual  knowledge  of 
Father  and  Son  seems  to  be  of  the  same  abso- 
lute kind;  and  what  is  more,  others  shall  know 
the  Father  only  in  so  far  as  the  Son  may 
think  fit  to  reveal  Him. 

It  is  impossible  to  believe  that  we  have 
here  in  the  one  the  ever-living  God,  and  in 
the  other  a  mere  human  being,  however  ex- 
alted he  may  be.  It  is  therefore  not  surpris- 
ing to  find  that  Christ  in  the  closing  verses  of 
this  Gospel  claims  to  be  a  sharer  in  the  Trinity 
of  the  Godhead.  "Having  declared  his  inter- 
communion with  the  Father,  who  is  the  Lord 
of  heaven  and  earth,  Jesus  here  asserts  that  all 
authority  has  been  given  him  in  heaven  and 
earth,  and  asserts  a  place  for  himself  in  the 
precincts  of  the  ineffable  Name.     Here  is  a 


Is   Jesus    God?  73 

claim  not  merely  to  a  deity  in  some  sense  equiv- 
alent to,  and  as  it  were  alongside  of,  the  deity 
of  the  Father,  but  to  a  deity  in  some  high 
sense  one  with  the  deity  of  the  Father." 

Finally,  in  this  capacity  Christ  claims  for 
himself  the  divine  prerogative  of  judgment. 
In  John  v.,  22,  he  declares  that  "the  Father 
judgeth  no  man,  but  hath  committed  all  judg- 
ment unto  the  Son."  The  climax,  however,  is 
reached  in  the  judgment  scene  in  Matt,  xxv., 
where  Christ  announces  himself  as  the  sole 
judge  of  all  men  at  his  second  coming.  This 
clearly  is  a  distinct  claim  to  divinity,  for  no 
work  can  be  more  exclusively  divine  in  its  very 
essence:  "When  the  Son  of  Man  shall  come 
in  his  glory,  and  all  the  holy  angels  with  him, 
then  shall  he  sit  upon  the  throne  of  his  glory : 
and  before  him  shall  be  gathered  all  the  na- 
tions, and  he  shall  separate  them  one  from 
another,  as  a  shepherd  divideth  the  sheep 
from  the  goats."  To  the  former  the  King 
shall  say:  "Come,  ye  blessed  of  my  Father, 
inherit  the  kingdom  prepared  for  you  from 
the  foundation  of  the  world."  But  the  latter 
he  shall  turn  from  his  presence  with  the 
words:  "Depart  from    me,  ye    cursed,   into 


74  Is    Jesus    God? 

everlasting  fire,  prepared  for  the  devil  and  his 
angels.  .  .  .  These  shall  go  away  into  eter- 
nal punishment,  but  the  righteous  into  life 
eternal." 


Second  Essay. 

By  Frank  Mackey  Richardson. 

Each  one  of  the  Evangelists  presents  to  us 
a  Divine  Christ.  Matthew,  while  he  does  not 
devote  as  much  space  to  his  Divinity  as  does 
John,  gives  us  a  Christ  who  could  only  be 
God,  if  he  taught  and  acted  as  he  presents 
him ;  so  also  with  Luke  and  Mark.  The  style 
and  strain  in  which  he  perpetually  spoke  is  as 
weighty  as  any  of  his  declarations. 

Christ  openly  claimed  to  be  the  Son  of 
God  according  to  the  Synoptics  (Matt,  xxvi., 
64,  and  Luke  xxii.,  69-7 1 ) .  In  the  instance  nar- 
rated here  Christ  is  being  questioned  by  Caia- 
phas,  and,  being  asked  if  he  is  the  Son  of  God, 
replies,  "Thou  hast  said.  Nevertheless  I  say 
unto  you,  Henceforth  ye  shall  see  the  Son  of 
man  sitting  at  the  right  hand  of  power  and 


Is   Jesus    God?  75 

coming  on  the  clouds  of  heaven."  In  Matt. 
xxvii.,  43,  we  read,  "He  trusted  in  God,  let 
Him  deliver  him  now,  if  He  desireth  him,  for 
he  said,  I  am  the  Son  of  God."  The  44th 
verse  testifies  that  even  the  robber  called  him 
the  Son  of  God,  and  Christ,  as  in  the  above 
passage,  accepted  the  title  and  in  this  instance 
sealed  it  with  his  own  blood. 

Christ  is  also  represented  as  claiming  su- 
premacy in  both  worlds  (Matt,  xiii.,  4I"42). 
"The  Son  of  man  shall  send  forth  his  angels 
and  they  shall  gather  out  of  his  kingdom  all 
things  that  cause  stumbling  and  them  that  do 
iniquity,  and  shall  cast  them  into  a  furnace  of 
fire :  there  shall  be  the  weeping  and  the  gnash- 
ing of  teeth."  Here  he  has  a  kingdom  and  is 
attended  by  a  retinue  of  angels.  He  is  to  pre- 
side at  the  judgment  and  cast  the  causers  of 
stumbling  and  the  doers  of  iniquity  into  the 
furnace  (Matt,  xxv.,  31-32).  "But  when  the 
Son  of  man  shall  come  in  his  glory  and  all  the 
angels  with  him,  then  shall  he  sit  on  the  throne 
of  his  glory:  and  before  him  shall  be  gathered 
all  the  nations :  and  he  shall  separate  them  one 
from  another,  as  the  shepherd  separateth  the 
sheep  from  the  goats;  and  he  shall  set  the 


76  Is    Jesus    God? 

sheep  on  his  right  hand  but  the  goats  on  his 
left."  And  (Matt,  xxv.,  34),  "then  shall  the 
King  say  unto  them  on  his  right  hand,  Come 
ye  blessed  of  my  Father,  inherit  the  kingdom 
prepared  for  you  from  the  foundation  of  the 
world."  And  in  the  41st  verse,  "Then  shall 
he  say  also  unto  them  on  the  left  hand,  De- 
part from  me  ye  cursed  into  the  eternal  fire 
which  is  prepared  for  the  devil  and  his  an- 
gels." "And  these  shall  go  away  into  eternal 
punishment,  but  the  righteous  into  eternal 
life"  (Matt,  xxv.,  46).  Here  he  is  the  su- 
preme Judge,  sending  the  righteous  to  heaven 
and  the  unrighteous  to  eternal  punishment. 
His  power  is  supreme,  he  is  conscious  of  it  at 
all  times,  in  fact  he  states  it  without  equivoca- 
tion in  Matt,  xxviii.,  18,  "And  Jesus  came  to 
them  and  spake  unto  them  saying,  All  author- 
ity hath  been  given  unto  me  in  heaven  and  on 
earth."  He  is  the  absolute  Judge.  In  his 
hands  is  all  authority.  Can  we  think  of  God 
being  any  more  powerful?  He  is  the  final 
and  absolute  court  of  all  decisions. 

In  his  great  sermon  on  the  mount  Christ 
claimed  to  be  the  great  teacher  come  with  a 
message.    Seven  times  in  one  chapter  does  he 


Is    Jesus    God?  77 

use  the  form,  "But  I  say  unto  you"  (Matt,  v., 
20,  22,  28,  32,  34,  39,  44).  In  Matt,  vii.,  24, 
he  says  that  it  is  the  wise  man  who  hears  these 
sayings  and  does  them.  Also  Matthew  de- 
scribes him  as  teaching  with  authority  (Matt, 
vii.,  29).  "For  he  taught  them  as  one  hav- 
ing authority  and  not  as  their  scribes."  In 
Matt,  xii.,  8,  Mark  ii.,  28,  and  Luke  vi.,  5, 
he  puts  aside  the  Jewish  Sabbath  and  tells  men 
unhesitatingly  that  he  is  Lord  of  the  Sabbath. 
Possibly  at  no  time  is  he  more  emphatic  than 
here,  and  this  is  recorded  by  all  the  Synoptics. 
Further  in  Matt,  xxviii.,  19-20,  "Go  ye  there- 
fore and  make  disciples  of  all  the  nations, 
baptizing  them  into  the  name  of  the  Father, 
and  of  the  Son,  and  of  the  Holy  Spirit, 
teaching  them  to  observe  all  things  what- 
soever I  commanded  you,  and  lo,  I  am 
with  you  always."  Here  all  the  world  is 
to  learn  of  his  teachings;  all  the  converted  are 
to  be  baptized  not  only  in  the  name  of  the 
Father  and  the  Holy  Spirit,  but  also  in  his 
name ;  and  he  is  going  to  be  present  with  them 
even  unto  the  end  of  the  world.  Could  God 
have  promised  more  ?  Is  it  not  an  evidence  of 
his  own  inner  consciousness? 


78  Is   Jesus    God? 

Christ  heals  men  of  their  sins,  as  in  Mark 
ii.,  5-7,  where  he  says  to  the  one  sick  of  the 
palsy,  on  seeing  their  faith,  "Son,  thy  sins  be 
forgiven  thee,"  and  in  verse  10,  "that  ye  may 
know  that  the  Son  of  man  hath  power  on  earth 
to  forgive  sins,  he  saith  to  the  sick  of  the  palsy, 
I  say  unto  thee,  Arise,  and  take  up  thy  bed, 
and  go  into  thine  house.  And  immediately 
he  arose,  took  up  the  bed,  and  went  forth  be- 
fore them  all;  insomuch  that  they  were  all 
amazed,  and  glorified  God,  saying,  We  never 
saw  it  on  this  fashion."  The  Jews  said  that 
no  one  save  God  can  forgive  sins.  Christ  not 
only  claimed  power  on  earth  to  forgive  sins, 
but  in  order  to  establish  his  claims  he  went  so 
far  as  to  seal  his  claim  to  supernatural  power 
by  performing  this  physical  cure.  Further 
claims  are  made  in  Matthew,  in  that  he  can 
heal  all  our  soul's  diseases.  "Come  unto  me, 
all  ye  that  labor  and  are  heavy  laden,  and  I 
will  give  you  rest.  Take  my  yoke  upon  you 
and  learn  of  me,  for  my  yoke  is  easy  and  my 
burden  is  light"  (Matt,  xi.,  28-30).  And 
again,  "All  things  have  been  delivered  unto 
me  of  my  Father,  and  no  one  knoweth  the  Son 
save  the  Father,  neither  doth  any  one  know 


Is   Jesus    God?  79 

the  Father  save  the  Son  and  he  to  whomso- 
ever the  Son  willeth  to  reveal  Him."  Luke 
x.,  22,  also  records  this  remarkable  claim  as 
presented  by  Christ.  He  is  on  a  par  with 
his  Father  which  is  just  as  deep  a  mystery. 
Our  eternal  destiny  depends  upon  whether  we 
accept  or  reject  him.  "Every  one  therefore 
who  shall  confess  me  before  men,  him  will  I 
also  confess  before  my  Father  who  is  in 
heaven,  but  whosoever  shall  deny  me  before 
men,  him  will  I  also  deny  before  my  Father 
who  is  in  heaven."  Who  but  one  that  is  in 
touch  with  God  and  holds  the  keys  to  his  opin- 
ions can  make  any  such  claims? 

So  far  we  have  occupied  ourselves  with  the 
Christ  that  Matthew,  Mark  and  Luke  give  us. 
We  find  in  him  a  Judge  of  both  worlds  of  om- 
nipotent power,  and  a  teacher  come  from  God. 
He  offers  peace  and  comfort  to  the  human  soul 
and  presents  himself  as  our  burden-bearer. 
His  mystery  of  Sonship  is  as  great  as  that  of 
his  Father.  He  is  the  mediator  between  God 
and  man  and  all  nations  must  be  taught  of  him 
and  baptized  in  his  name.  Could  the  Synoptics 
have  presented  a  more  divine  Christ?  Could 
they  have  invented  such  complex  claims  ? 


80  Is   Jesus    God? 

It  is  admitted  by  all  that  John  presents  a 
Christ  that  is  God.  It  is  our  purpose  now  to 
show  that  it  is  the  same  Christ  that  the  Synop- 
tics portray.  In  his  interview  with  Nicode- 
mus,  Jesus  expressly  declares  his  divinity.  "He 
that  believeth  on  him  is  not  judged,  but  he 
that  believeth  not  hath  been  judged  already 
because  he  hath  not  believed  on  the  name  of 
the  only  begotten  Son  of  God"  (John  iii.,  1 8 ) . 
Also  (verse  16),  "For  God  so  loved  the 
world  that  He  gave  his  only  begotten  Son  that 
whosoever  believeth  on  him  should  not  perish 
but  have  eternal  life."  In  Matthew  he  is  pre- 
sented as  the  final  and  absolute  Judge  and  in 
John  he  is  the  one  to  give  away  the  mansions 
on  high  (John  xiv.,  1-3),  "Let  not  your  heart 
be  troubled:  ye  believe  in  God,  believe  also 
in  me.  In  my  Father's  house  are  many  man- 
sions: if  it  were  not  so,  I  would  have  told  you. 
I  go  to  prepare  a  place  for  you."  He  also 
claimed  to  have  absolute  power  over  his  own 
life.  "No  one  taketh  it  away  from  me,  but  I 
lay  it  down  of  myself.  I  have  power  to  lay  it 
down  and  I  have  power  to  take  it  again. 
This  commandment  received  I  from  my  Fath- 
er" (John  x.,    18).    Also   he   claimed   that 


Is   Jesus    God?  8 1 

those  even  then  that  should  hear  his  voice 
should  live  (John  v.,  25),  " Verily,  verily,  I 
say  unto  you,  the  hour  is  coming  and  now  is, 
when  the  dead  shall  hear  the  voice  of  the  Son 
of  God:  and  they  that  hear  shall  live."  Also 
as  in  the  Synoptics  he  is  made  the  eternal 
Judge.  "For  neither  doth  the  Father  judge 
any  man,  but  he  hath  given  all  judgment  unto 
the  Son"  (John  v.,  22).  "Marvel  not  at  this : 
for  the  hour  cometh  in  which  all  that  are 
in  the  tombs  shall  hear  his  voice"  (John  v., 
28) .  Again  in  John  he  claims  to  have  power 
to  bestow  eternal  life  (John  iv.,  14).  "But 
whosoever  drinketh  of  the  water  that  I  shall 
give  him  shall  never  thirst;  but  the  water  that 
I  shall  give  him  shall  become  in  him  a  well  of 
water  springing  up  unto  eternal  life." 


DID  JESUS  TEACH  HIS  OWN  DEITY? 

First  Essay. 
By  William  Arthur  Motter. 

The  question,  whether  Jesus  taught  his 
deity,  is  a  purely  historical  one  and  must  be 
approached  in  the  attitude  of  historical  investi- 
gation. We  must  examine  the  evidence,  and 
on  the  basis  of  an  honest  investigation  draw 
our  conclusions.  We  must  approach  the  ques- 
tion with  an  open  mind.  To  have  our  minds 
made  up  at  the  outset  that  Jesus  was  not  God 
is  to  approach  the  question  with  a  bias  which 
is  bound  to  affect  our  conclusions.  On  the 
other  hand,  our  conclusions  must  not  be  col- 
ored by  the  fact  that  the  records  with  which 
we  deal  profess  to  be  inspired  and  therefore 
infallible.  We  approach  such  evidence  as  we 
approach  any  other  historical  evidence,  and 
accept  it  for  what  it  is  worth. 

The  question  with  which  we  are  concerned 
is  a  very  important  one.  We  have  already 
seen  that  from  the  very  beginning  the  Chris- 

82 


Is   Jesus    God?  83 

tian  Church  has  believed  in  the  deity  of  Jesus 
Christ.  We  have  also  seen  that  the  Church 
has  represented  Jesus  as  teaching  his  own 
deity.  Apart,  then,  from  the  question  whether 
Jesus  is  divine,  if  we  can  show  that  Jesus  did 
teach  his  deity  we  have  an  explanation  for  the 
belief  and  teaching  of  the  early  Church;  but 
if  Christ  did  not  teach  his  deity,  then  the  Jesus 
of  the  Christian  Church  is  not  the  real  Jesus, 
and  the  Church  of  Christ  has  been  laboring 
for  nineteen  centuries  under  a  great  delusion. 

An  answer  to  the  question,  Did  Jesus  teach 
his  deity?  must  carry  us  back  to  the  Christ 
who  walked  and  talked  upon  the  earth.  We 
shall  therefore  be  concerned  with  two  ques- 
tions :  the  evidence,  and  its  trustworthiness. 

An  examination  of  the  evidence  reveals,  in 
the  first  place,  that  our  only  source  of  informa- 
tion for  the  life  and  teaching  of  Christ  is  the 
literature  of  the  early  Christian  Church,  name- 
ly, the  accounts  of  Jesus  as  found  in  the  four 
canonical  Gospels. 

We  learn,  in  the  second  place,  that  these 
four  Gospels  were  written  by  men  who  were 
in  a  position  to  know  whereof  they  wrote. 
Two  of  these  documents,  the  Gospel  according 


84  Is    Jesus    God? 

to  Matthew,  and  the  Gospel  according  to 
John,  come  from  men  who  were  known  to 
have  been  companions  of  Christ  during  the 
greater  part  of  his  public  ministry;  men  who 
were  in  a  position  to  portray  accurately  the 
scenes  in  the  life  of  Christ  which  they  had 
witnessed  with  their  own  eyes,  and  to  record 
the  words  which  they  had  heard  with  their 
own  ears.  Mark,  the  writer  of  the  second 
Gospel,  is  known  to  have  been  a  companion 
of  Peter  who  himself  was  an  eye-witness  and 
played  a  leading  role  among  the  followers  of 
Christ.  Concerning  Luke,  the  author  of  the 
third  Gospel,  we  know  that  he  was  an  edu- 
cated Greek  physician,  a  companion  of  Paul. 
A  study  of  his  Gospel  has  convinced  scholars 
that  he  is  a  careful  and  accurate  historian,  and 
we  have  little  reason  to  doubt  his  procedure 
as  set  forth  in  the  prologue  of  his  Gospel,  in 
which  he  tells  us  that  he  gathered  his  ma- 
terials for  his  Gospel  from  those  "who  from 
the  beginning  were  eye-witnesses  and  minis- 
ters of  the  Word."  "Having  traced  the 
course  of  all  things  accurately  from  the  first," 
he  says,  "I  write  unto  you,  most  excellent  The- 
ophilus,  that  thou  mightest  know  the  certainty 


Is    Jesus    God?  85 

concerning  the  things  wherein  thou  wast  in- 
structed." Such,  then,  were  the  qualifications 
of  the  men  who  profess  to  record  for  us  the 
life  and  teachings  of  Jesus  Christ.  From  the 
previous  papers  we  have  already  learned  that 
these  records  represent  Jesus  as  teaching  his 
deity,  not  only  by  implied  statements,  but  out 
and  out,  in  so  many  words ;  not  in  a  few  iso- 
lated passages,  but  over  and  over  again  in 
unmistakable  terms. 

We  find,  in  the  third  place,  that  these  rec- 
ords carry  us  back  close  to  the  events  they 
profess  to  record.  In  our  search  for  the  prim- 
itive Jesus  wTe  may  for  the  time  being  disre- 
gard the  Gospel  of  John,  which  comes  from 
toward  the  close  of  the  first  century,  and  con- 
fine our  attention  to  the  Synoptists  who  present 
our  earliest  extant  witness  to  the  teachings  of 
Christ.  It  is  generally  agreed  that  the  Synop- 
tic Gospels  were  written  before  80  A.D.,  and 
there  seems  little  reason  to  doubt  that  they 
were  written  before  the  fall  of  Jerusalem  in 
70  A.D.  But  even  taking  the  later  of  the 
two  dates,  the  evidence  carries  us  back  to 
within  fifty  years  of  the  death  of  Christ,  and 
comes   from  men  who  were  either   eye-wit- 


86  Is   Jesus    God? 

nesses  or  contemporaneous  with  the  events 
they  record.  This  means  that  the  Gospels 
were  written  at  a  time  when  the  life  and  teach- 
ing of  Christ  were  still  fresh  in  the  world, 
when  we  have  every  reason  to  believe  that  had 
the  facts  recorded  not  been  true,  they  would 
have  been  refuted  by  the  Jewish  world,  which 
was  very  bitter  towards  the  claims  of  Christ. 
For  example,  taking  an  instance  that  bears 
directly  upon  our  question,  the  Gospel  records 
tell  us  that  Jesus  was  condemned  before  the 
Sanhedrin  because  he  taught  that  he  was  the 
Son  of  God.  Here  is  the  record  of  a  fact 
that  could  easily  have  been  refuted,  and  we 
have  every  reason  to  believe  would  have  been 
refuted,  were  it  not  true. 

These,  then,  are  the  documents  which  pro- 
vide the  data  for  the  student  of  history,  docu- 
ments which  clearly  represent  Jesus  as  teaching 
his  own  deity.  In  the  face  of  their  representa- 
tions of  Jesus  we  ask  the  question,  Can  we 
believe  that  Jesus  taught  his  deity  ?  Our  ques- 
tion emerges  as  a  small  part  of  a  greater  ques- 
tion, the  trustworthiness  of  the  Gospel  record. 
The  teaching  of  Christ  is  inseparable  from  his 
life.    His  words  form  an  integral  part  of  the 


Is    Jesus    God?  87 

Gospel  narrative.  So  close  is  this  relation  that 
the  record  of  his  words  and  the  record  of  his 
deeds  stand  or  fall  together.  Can  we  trust 
the  portrait  of  Christ  which  we  find  in  the 
Gospel  record?  Does  it  represent  the  real 
Jesus?  Did  Jesus  claim  for  himself  the  high 
place  he  holds  in  the  minds  of  his  first  fol- 
lowers? Did  he  do  as  they  say,  claim  that  he 
was  God? 

Liberal  theology  tells  us  today  that  Chris- 
tianity was  founded  by  Paul,  that  Paul  trans- 
formed the  message  of  the  Kingdom  which 
Christ  brought,  namely,  the  "Fatherhood  of 
God  and  the  Brotherhood  of  Man,"  into  a 
message  which  centered  in  the  person  of  a 
Christ  who  was  regarded  as  divine.  Exam- 
ine the  Epistles  of  Paul,  which  for  the  most 
part  are  earlier  than  the  Gospels,  and  you 
have  a  Christianity  centering  in  the  death,  the 
resurrection,  and  the  atonement  of  Christ  the 
Son  of  God.  Search  for  the  teaching  of  Jesus, 
and  it  is  surprisingly  lacking.  We  find  the 
early  Church  emerging  with  a  strong  belief  in 
the  deity  of  Christ.  Perhaps  this  "relief, 
which  antedates  the  Gospel  record,  was  read 
back  into  the  life  of  Christ,  and  colored  the 


88  Is   Jesus    God? 

portrait  which  his  first  followers  have  given 
us  in  the  Gospels.  If  this  is  true,  then  we 
want  to  get  back  to  the  real  Jesus. 

Liberal  theology  tells  us  that  the  primi- 
tive Jesus  was  a  human  Jesus:  that  the  divine 
Jesus  was  the  product  of  the  Church.  If  this 
is  true,  then  is  the  Jesus  who  teaches  his  deity 
also  a  product  of  the  Church?  Jiilicher  says, 
"Even  the  earliest  tradition  cannot  be  assumed 
to  be  free  from  the  bias  of  the  first  inter- 
preters." "The  sources  as  we  have  them 
now,"  says  Wernle,  "are  not  free  from  the 
possibility  of  modification  and  adulteration. 
They  represent  the  belief  of  the  Christians  as 
it  developed  through  four  decades."  Johannes 
Weiss  tells  us  that  a  study  of  the  Gospel  of 
Mark  reveals  two  pictures  of  Jesus:  one  rep- 
resenting him  as  purely  human,  the  other  as 
a  God  to  whom  all  things  are  possible;  and 
with  the  peculiar  bias  of  the  liberal  school,  he 
tells  us  that  the  human  Jesus  is  the  earlier, 
the  true  Jesus :  the  divine  Jesus  is  the  product 
of  the  Church.  Wrede  tells  us  that  Jesus  was 
not  Messiah  and  did  not  wish  to  be,  but  after 
the  resurrection  the  disciples  began  to  believe 
that  he  was  divine,  and  hence  they  came  to  the 


Is   Jesus    God?  89 

conclusion  that  he  must  have  taught  his  Mes- 
siahship,  though  at  first  only  in  a  hidden  way. 
Hence  in  the  Gospel  of  Mark,  which  is  re- 
garded as  the  earliest  Gospel,  he  finds 
the  beginning  of  the  tendency  to  represent 
Jesus  as  teaching  his  deity.  Accordingly 
we  meet  with  such  statements  as  these: 
"and  he  suffered  not  the  demons  to  speak" 
(i.,  34)  ;  "and  he  charged  them  that  no 
man  should  know  this"  (v.,  43).  And,  after 
the  great  confession  at  Caesarea  Philippi, 
"he  charged  them  that  they  should  tell  no 
man  of  him"  (viii.,  30) .  This  is  only  the  be- 
ginning of  the  tendency  which  we  find  culmi- 
nating in  the  fouth  Gospel,  where  Jesus  is 
represented  as  openly  teaching  his  Messiah- 
ship. 

If  the  theory  of  the  liberal  theologians  is 
true,  then  our  task  as  historians,  seeking  for 
the  words  of  Christ  in  regard  to  himself,  is 
the  task  of  separating  the  late  element,  the 
mythical  element,  the  element  which  the 
Church  has  read  backward  into  the  life  of 
Christ,  from  the  primitive  Jesus,  the  human 
Jesus.  We  may  search  for  the  primitive  Jesus 
along  two  different  lines.    We  may,  by  a  liter- 


90  Is   Jesus   Got 

ary  study  of  the  documents,  seek  to  get  back 
of  the  present  documents,  and  thus  find  a  more 
primitive  Jesus;  or  we  may,  by  some  subjec- 
tive test,  seek  to  eliminate  the  true  from  the 
false  and  thus  arrive  at  a  true  Jesus. 

Taking  up  a  literary  study  of  the  Gospels, 
we  find  that  the  three  Synoptists  stand  inti- 
mately related,  and  back  of  them  there  seem 
to  be  even  more  primitive  sources.  Critical 
schools  today  are  generally  agreed  upon  two 
primitive  sources.  The  first,  commonly  called 
Ur-Markus,  lying  back  of  our  present  Mark, 
(or  according  to  some  identical  with  our  pres- 
ent Mark),  and  taken  over  almost  bodily  by 
Matthew  and  Luke.  Besides  this  there  is  a 
second  source,  commonly  called  the  Logia 
source,  to  which  are  traced  passages  common 
to  Matthew  and  Luke  not  found  in  Mark. 
This  is  sometimes  believed  to  have  been  the 
original  Gospel  of  Matthew  in  Aramaic. 
Granting  that  these  sources  actually  existed, 
and  that  the  Synoptists  used  them,  we  would 
naturally  expect  them  to  represent  the  sources 
from  which  they  were  borrowed.  If  such  is 
the  case,  then  we  have  fragments  embedded 
in  our  present  Gospels  which  carry  us  back 


Is   Jesus    God?  91 

"one  literary  generation"  nearer  the  life  of 
Christ.  Confining  our  attention  then  to  the 
fragments  of  these  primitive  sources  em- 
bedded in  the  Gospels,  namely,  those  portions 
common  to  Matthew  and  Luke  which  are 
found  in  Mark,  as  representative  of  Ur- 
Markus,  and  those  portions  common  to  both, 
but  not  found  in  Mark,  as  representative  of 
the  Logia  source,  what  do  we  find?  We  find 
a  portrait  of  a  Jesus  whose  life  and  teachings 
correspond  exactly  to  the  portrait  of  the 
whole  Gospels.  We  find  no  evidence  in  these 
fragments  of  a  Jesus  who  is  regarded  as  less 
divine,  or  who  does  not  teach  his  deity.  As 
far  back  then  as  literary  criticism  can  carry 
us,  we  find  only  one  Jesus,  a  Jesus  who  both 
regards  himself  as  divine,  and  teaches  his  own 
deity. 

Literary  criticism  fails  to  reveal  a  Jesus 
who  does  not  teach  his  deity.  We  have  yet 
to  follow  out  the  results  of  historical  criticism 
in  its  attempt  to  separate  the  mythical  and 
ideal  elements  in  the  Gospels  from  the  true. 
The  great  problem  which  confronts  the  his- 
torical student  now,  is  that  of  finding  some 
adequate  test  by  which  he  can  eliminate  all  but 


92  Is   Jesus    God? 

the  true.  What  is  to  be  this  standard?  Har- 
nack  says:  "Whoever  has  a  good  eye,  and  a 
true  sense  of  the  really  great,  must  be  able 
to  see  it  and  distinguish  between  the  kernel 
and  the  transitory  husk."  Pfleiderer  mentions, 
"Healthy  eyes."  Bousset  asks,  "Is  it  psycho- 
logically comprehensible?"  Some  one  else 
says,  "What  could  not  have  been  invented." 
It  is  just  here  that  so  much  of  our  so-called 
historical  criticism  has  failed.  Liberal  theo- 
logians have  approached  the  question  with 
minds  already  made  up  that  the  true  Jesus  was 
a  human  Jesus.  To  find  the  true  Jesus  they 
only  need  some  standard  by  which  the  divine 
element  can  be  eliminated.  Convinced  at  the 
outset  that  Jesus  was  not  divine,  they  tell  us 
that  Jesus  was  deified  by  his  followers.  If 
you  would  find  the  true  Jesus,  says  Schmiedel, 
reject  everything  in  the  Gospels  that  is  not 
contradictory  to  the  idea  of  worship — and 
what  do  you  have  left?  In  the  first  instance, 
five,  or  possibly  nine  passages,  holding  before 
us  a  Jesus  who  could  not  possibly  account  for 
the  Gospel  portrait:  a  Jesus  who  says  nothing 
about  his  deity. 

To   approach   our   question   squarely   and 


Is    Jesus    God?  93 

without  prejudice,  we  must  at  least  be 
willing  to  admit  the  possibility  that  Jesus 
was  divine  and  taught  his  deity.  Suppose 
we  begin  by  admitting  such  a  possibility, 
and  at  once  Schmiedel's  standard  must  be 
ruled  out,  for  it  involves  the  very  point  at 
issue.  He  tells  us  that  the  followers  of  Christ 
worshipped  him;  but  suppose  Christ  was 
really  divine,  then  would  it  be  wrong  to  wor- 
ship him,  or  would  the  Gospel  record  be  any 
the  less  true  because  Christ,  who  was  God, 
was  worshipped  as  God?  Johannes  Weiss 
finds  two  distinct  portraits  of  Christ  in  the 
Gospel  of  Mark:  a  human  Christ,  and  a  di- 
vine Christ;  and  because  he  does  not  believe 
that  Christ  was  divine  he  holds  on  to  the 
human  Christ  and  discards  the  deified  Christ. 
But  suppose  Jesus  was  what  the  Church  has 
always  believed  him  to  be,  both  God  and  man, 
then  his  criterion  must  be  discarded.  Start 
with  your  mind  made  up  that  there  never  was 
a  divine  Jesus,  and  historical  criticism  can 
yield  but  one  result :  a  Jesus  who  did  not  teach 
his  deity.  The  man  whose  mind  is  made  up 
at  the  outset,  in  the  words  of  Kalthoff, 
"leaves  of  the  words  of  Christ  only  what  he 


94  Is   Jesus    God? 

can  make  use  of  according  to  his  preconceived 
notions  of  what  is  historically  possible.  Lack- 
ing every  historical  definiteness,  the  name  of 
Jesus  becomes  an  empty  vessel  into  which 
every  theologian  pours  his  own  thoughts  and 
ideas." 

Liberal  theology  starts  with  a  Jesus  who 
is  human,  but  the  human  Jesus  of  liberal 
theology  leaves  all  the  facts  unexplained. 
Granted  that  Jesus  was  mere  man,  how  ac- 
count for  the  Gospel?  If  Jesus  were  mere 
man,  then  our  Gospel  is  a  myth  and  we  have 
no  way  of  getting  back  to  the  real  Jesus.  If 
the  Gospel  is  a  myth,  if  the  Church  invented 
the  divine  Christ,  it  must  have  invented  his 
words  in  which  he  teaches  his  deity.  If  this 
be  true,  how  explain  the  belief  of  the  early 
Church?  Apart  now  from  the  fact  as  to 
whether  Jesus  were  divine  or  not,  we  cannot 
explain  the  belief  of  the  Church  in  his  deity, 
or  in  the  fact  that  he  teaches  his  deity,  if  he 
did  not  teach  it.  The  conclusions  of  liberal  criti- 
cism do  not  do  justice  to  the  facts.  After  lib- 
eral criticism  has  said  its  last  word,  we  have 
a  Gospel  in  which  Jesus  teaches  his  own  deity, 
and  that  Gospel  must  be  explained.    If  Christ 


Is   Jesus    God?  95 

did  not  teach  his  deity,  then  the  Gospel  which 
represents  him  both  as  divine  and  as  teaching 
his  deity  is  more  wonderful  and  more  difficult 
to  explain  than  the  life  it  records. 

The  facts  of  the  Gospel  need  an  explana- 
tion. We  must  do  one  of  two  things :  regard 
the  Gospel  as  historical,  or  give  up  the  whole 
record.  But  the  latter  alternative  is  not  neces- 
sary. "It  might  be  reassuring  to  us  as  his- 
torians," says  Dr.  Denney,  "to  find  that  there 
are  passages  in  the  Gospels  which  no  worship- 
per of  Jesus  could  have  invented,  which  were 
data  to  the  Evangelists  and  which  we  are  safe 
in  counting  historical."  This  is  the  problem 
to  which  he  devotes  himself  in  the  greater  part 
of  his  Jesus  and  the  Gospel.  Going  back  to 
the  documents,  which  critics  find  embedded  in 
the  Gospels,  and  which  they  designate  as  the 
earliest  representations  of  Jesus,  he  searches 
out  those  passages  which  could  not  possibly 
have  been  invented  by  the  followers  of  Christ, 
in  which  Jesus  is  represented  either  as  con- 
scious of,  or  as  teaching  his  deity.  He  re- 
minds us  at  the  outset  that,  "The  force  of  the 
argument  does  not  depend  on  any  single  pass- 
age,   but    on    the    cumulative    effect    of    the 


g6  Is    Jesus    God? 

whole."  For  the  student  of  history  who  ap- 
proaches the  question  with  open  mind  the 
numerous  passages  which  he  cites  are  conclu- 
sive proof  that,  regardless  of  whether  or  not 
Jesus  was  divine,  he  regarded  himself  as  di- 
vine and  taught  his  own  deity. 

In  conclusion,  we  remark  in  the  words  of 
Professor  Gwatkin:  "If  we  know  anything 
for  certain  about  Jesus  of  Nazareth,  it  is  that 
he  steadily  claimed  to  be  the  Son  of  God,  Re- 
deemer of  Mankind,  and  the  Ruler  of  the 
world  to  come;  and  by  that  claim  the  Gospel 
stands  or  falls." 


Second  Essay. 

By  William  Nicol. 

This  question  now  leads  us  a  step  further 
back  in  our  discussion.  The  first  pair  of 
papers  have  shown  that  the  Christian  Church 
does  now  teach,  and  always  has  taught,  the 
deity  of  Christ,  upon  the  strength  of  the  pre- 
supposed fact  that  such  was  also  the  teaching 
of  the  New  Testament.    The  second  pair  of 


Is   Jesus    God?  97 

papers  then  proceeded  to  investigate  this  pre- 
viously presupposed  teaching,  and  showed 
that  all  the  New  Testament  writers  do  really 
teach  the  deity  of  Christ,  in  their  turn  making 
the  supposition  that  Jesus  really  did  utter  this 
teaching.  Our  question  now  takes  up  this  sup- 
position, and  asks  whether  the  teaching  of 
the  New  Testament  writers  is  established  on 
such  a  historical  fact,  as  that  of  Jesus  him- 
self teaching  his  deity,  or  whether  their  teach- 
ing may  not  have  arisen  later  from  other 
causes.  If  we  may  anticipate  somewhat  to 
show  the  connection,  we  might  say  that  the 
next  and  final  paper  will  again  have  to  go  be- 
hind this,  and,  taking  it  for  granted  that  Jesus 
did  teach  his  deity,  ask  whether  he  was  right 
in  doing  so,  and  whether  there  was  no  decep- 
tion or  self-delusion  in  the  case. 

What  amount  of  evidence  do  you  suppose 
a  historian  would  require  to  establish  on 
sound  historical  principles  the  fact  that  nine- 
teen hundred  years  ago  a  certain  man  lived 
who,  whether  he  was  right  or  wrong,  taught 
his  own  deity?  Some  people  seem  to  want  to 
go  to  work  with  nothing  but  their  five  senses, 
and  require  of  us  that  we  shall  present  facts, 


98  Is    Jesus    God? 

or  rather  objects,  which  will  appeal  to  those 
senses  in  such  a  way  as  to  demonstrate  con- 
clusively what  we  have  to  prove.  If  that  is 
your  demand  the  task  is  hopeless,  for  you  are 
asking  something  which  it  is  beyond  the 
power  of  any  system  of  historical  investiga- 
tion to  reach. 

In  making  this  concession  I  would,  however, 
remark  that  on  your  basis  of  demonstration 
every  past  fact  of  history  would  be  disproved, 
or  to  say  the  very  least,  it  would  become  im- 
possible to  establish  securely  any  such  fact. 
If  you  refuse  to  make  use  of  recorded  testi- 
mony after  your  best  efforts  to  prove  that  it 
is  not  authentic  have  failed,  well  then  there 
simply  is  no  more  history  existing  for  you. 
Then  it  is  no  use  granting  that  a  man  must 
have  lived  because  you  see  a  monument  erect- 
ed to  his  memory,  because  there  is  almost  as. 
much  chance  of  the  erection  of  a  false  monu- 
ment as  of  the  publication  of  a  false  book. 
Why,  at  that  rate  you  cannot  even  prove  that 
Napoleon  ever  lived,  and  some  people  would 
be  thrown  into  serious  doubt  about  those  of 
their  ancestors  who  died  before  their  birth.  It 
seems    that    even    the    extremely    up-to-date 


Is    Jesus    God?  99 

sworn  testimony  of  a  photograph  would  not 
be  worth  much.  You  noticed  in  the  papers  a 
short  while  ago,  that  a  certain  Mr.  Gompers 
of  Chicago  was  accused  of  standing  on  the 
Stars  and  Stripes  while  addressing  a  social- 
istic meeting  in  that  city.  To  substantiate 
this  accusation,  a  photograph  was  produced 
of  Mr.  Gompers  holding  forth  to  his  men 
with  his  feet  upon  the  flag.  This  looks  very 
serious,  but  no,  Mr.  Gompers'  attorney  finds 
an  expert  photographer  who  proves  that  the 
photograph  was  faked,  and  Mr.  Gompers  is 
saved. 

It  would  appear,  then,  that  it  is  neither  fair 
nor  possible  to  conduct  a  historical  investiga- 
tion upon  such  a  basis,  and  with  these  de- 
mands. We  have  a  right,  and  it  is  our  duty, 
to  examine  our  data  before  we  formulate  our 
historical  scheme ;  but  if  we  ever  wish  to  ac- 
complish anything,  we  will  have  to  put  a  cer- 
tain amount  of  faith  in  others,  and  make  use 
of  the  facts  which  they  had  a  better  opportun- 
ity of  ascertaining,  and  have  recorded  for  us. 
The  difficulty  seems  to  have  arisen  because 
certain  people  who  turn  their  attention  to  the 
person   of  Christ  have  previously  made  up 


ioo  Is   Jesus    God? 

their  minds  as  to  what  can  possibly  happen 
and  what  cannot  possibly  happen.  When  such 
a  student  is  confronted  by  the  fact  of  a  widely 
distributed  community,  the  Christian  Church, 
which  universally  believes  in  the  deity  of  her 
Christ,  he  at  first  decides  that  this  bit  of 
superstition  must  be  a  late  importation.  On 
further  investigation,  however,  he  finds  that 
this  has  been  prevalent  in  the  Church  for 
these  many  centuries,  and  that  it  is  still  sup- 
posed to  be  established  on  the  teaching  of  the 
New  Testament.  He  thereupon  turns  his  at- 
tention to  those  writings  in  the  hope  of  being 
able  to  find  that  they  do  not  really  commit 
themselves  to  any  such  doctrine.  This,  then, 
also  proves  a  failure,  and  he  simply  brushes 
it  aside,  and  finds  himself  driven  to  the  con- 
clusion that  the  mistake  is  not  in  the  interpre- 
tation of  the  representation,  but  somewhere 
in  the  underlying  facts.  He  is  now  confronted 
by  his  last  choice,  and  has  either  to  decide  that 
the  records  are  at  variance  with  what  Jesus 
taught, — and  then  it  follows  that  he  never 
taught  his  deity, — or  Jesus  was  at  variance 
with  the  facts  of  the  case,  in  which  event  he 
did  teach  his  deity,  and  was  correctly  repre- 


Is    Jesus    God?  101 

sented  by  the  Evangelists,  but  must  himself 
have  been  a  deceiver  of  the  highest  ability; 
for  remember  that  whatever  happens,  it  is  the 
foregone  conclusion  of  our  student  that  God 
cannot  at  the  same  time  be  man.  To  save  the 
character,  the  veracity  of  Jesus,  he  has  there- 
fore to  assume  that  he  has  been  misrepre- 
sented; and  having  now  fixed  this,  he  sets 
about  explaining  everything  in  the  light  of 
such  a  misrepresentation. 

So,  for  instance,  P.  W.  Schmiedel  follows 
the  trail  of  the  investigation  up  to  the  spot 
where  he  has  to  admit  that  it  was  generally 
held  in  the  early  Church  of  the  eighth  decade 
that  Christ  was  God,  and  that  this  belief  is 
recorded  by  the  Evangelists — men  who  were 
thoroughly  acquainted  with  the  whole  current 
of  contemporary  opinion  concerning  Jesus.  We 
would  now  think  that  Schmiedel  has  gone  so 
far  in  admitting  this  that  he  will  have  to  go  all 
the  way  with  us,  and  admit  also  that  Jesus  did 
teach  his  deity.  But  not  so,  for  in  the  very  fact 
that  the  Evangelists  and  those  on  whom  they 
depended  were  under  the  spell  of  the  fascinat- 
ing personality  of  Jesus,  and  had  learned  to 
make  much  of  him,  Schmiedel  finds  the  reason 


102  Is   Jesus    God? 

why  they  are  not  to  be  trusted.  Accordingly  his 
revision  of  the  life  of  Jesus  and  of  his  sayings 
tries  to  make  use  of  only  that  which  could  not 
be  ascribed  to  the  adoration  of  the  writers. 
In  this  case,  then,  the  link  between  truth  and 
later  falsehood  is  not  in  Jesus  himself,  for 
he  was  faithful  in  that  he  did  not  teach  his 
deity,  nor  is  it  in  the  false  interpretation  we 
are  putting  on  the  writings  of  the  Evangelists, 
for  it  is  admitted  that  our  exegesis  is  on  the 
whole  correct,  but  it  is  just  in  the  connection 
between  Jesus  and  his  immediate  followers, 
who  magnified  a  good  man  into  a  God. 

Not  unlike  this  is  the  standpoint  of  Jo- 
hannes Weiss,  who  would  also  save  the  char- 
acter of  Jesus  at  the  expense  of  his  deity.  He 
finds  the  center  of  the  mistaken  doctrine  in  the 
conversion  of  Paul,  who  had  himself  never 
seen  our  Lord,  or  at  least  had  not  been  under 
the  influence  of  his  teaching.  The  conversion 
of  Paul  may  then  have  been  a  purely  natural 
occurrence,  resulting  from  his  hostile  attitude 
of  mind  toward  the  Christians,  which  went 
over  into  its  direct  opposite  when  he  fell  a 
victim  to  sun-stroke  on  his  way  to  persecute 
those  at  Damascus.     Immediately  turning  be- 


Is    Jesus    God?  103 

liever  in  the  resurrection  of  Christ,  who,  he 
thought,  had  here  appeared  to  him,  he  be- 
comes the  introducer  into  Christianity  of  the 
Logos  christology,  which  was  later  fully  de- 
veloped in  the  Christian  community  to  mean 
that  Christ  is  simply  God  himself.  With  this 
rich  meaning  Weiss  admits  that  John  speaks  of 
the  deity  of  Christ,  but  Paul  himself  still  meant 
something  lower,  while  the  Synoptists  had  a 
Christ  in  mind  who  was  not  much  more  than,  if 
not  purely,  human,  and  only  added  divine  ele- 
ments to  their  representation,  under  the  influ- 
ence of  the  christology  prevalent  at  the  time 
that  they  were  writing.  Here  in  the  case  of 
Weiss  it  is  again  clear  that  the  honesty  and 
sanity  of  Christ,  on  the  one  hand,  are  not 
doubted;  and  on  the  other  hand,  the  ordinary 
exegesis  of  the  New  Testament  which  finds 
there  a  representation  of  Christ  as  divine  is 
admitted  to  be  correct;  but  in  between  the 
mistake  is  supposed  to  lie,  viz.,  in  the  way  in 
which  the  followers  of  Jesus  immediately  be- 
gan to  think  of  him  after  his  death,  and  in 
which  they  consequently  represented  him  as 
speaking. 

With  these  we  may,  roughly  speaking,  class 


104  ?s   Jesus    God? 

that  group  of  writers  who  deny  that  Jesus 
ever  lived,  and  attribute  the  growth  of  New 
Testament  christology  to  pure  myth,  for  from 
that  assertion  it  must  necessarily  follow  that 
he  did  not  teach  his  deity  either.  In  this 
Strauss  has  been  fairly  outdone  by  men 
like  Drews,  who  are  satisfied  by  the  ideal  truth 
represented  by  Christ,  of  the  approach  of  man 
to  God,  and  do  not  require  the  historical  truth 
of  his  life  and  work.  Not  totally  unlike  this 
speaks  Anderson  of  Dundee  in  the  Hibbert 
Journal  when  he  wishes  to  show  that,  though 
there  may  have  been,  and  very  likely  was, 
a  human  Jesus  to  whom  the  historical  part 
of  the  narrative  relates,  other  more  im- 
portant parts  were  derived  from  the  mythol- 
ogizing  faculty  of  one  of  those  clubs  that  were 
prevalent  in  the  Roman  Empire  at  the  time, 
and  which  wreathed  a  garland  of  glory  con- 
taining "elements  of  Jewish  materialism, 
Greek  philosophy,  Oriental  cults  of  dying  and 
rising  savior-gods,  and  the  prevalent  Roman 
emperor-worship,  around  the  dim  and  meagre 
outlines  of  a  slain  Jesus. " 

All  these  different  views  we   cannot  here 
consider  in  the  conclusions  at  which  they  ar- 


Is   Jesus    God?  105 

rive,  but  we  note  that  they  all  have  to  make 
the  same  point  to  begin  with,  that,  namely, 
the  Evangelists  are  all  radically  misrepresent- 
ing Jesus. 

Let  us  look  at  the  historical  position  to  see 
if  this  could  be  possible.  It  is  at  once  clear, 
and  admitted,  that  as  early  as  the  seventies 
there  is  a  universal  and  very  strong  conviction 
among  the  Christians  of  the  deity  of  Christ. 
This  tendency  is  so  strong  that  the  three 
Synoptists,  writing  accounts  of  Jesus  about  that 
time,  just  allow  those  narratives  to  overflow 
with  that  doctrine.  The  Ur-Markus,  the  Lo- 
gia,  or  whatever  else  may  lie  at  the  foundation 
of  these  Gospels  in  the  form  of  writings  or 
stereotyped  tradition,  make  it  clear  that  even 
in  the  fifties  this  doctrine  must  already  have 
been  general.  Because,  whether  with  Jo- 
hannes Weiss  and  others,  you  think  that 
these  Gospels  only  reflect  the  then  prevalent 
christology,  or  with  the  orthodox  party,  you 
think  that  these  Gospels  were  the  memorabilia 
of  some  of  the  disciples  about  Jesus,  in  any 
case  they  make  such  vital  statements  that  for 
them  to  have  passed  unchallenged  by  the 
Christians  is  proof  enough  of  their  having 


106  Is   Jesus    God? 

been  according  to  the  popular  mind.  Now 
whatever  it  was  that  Jesus  did,  and  for  what- 
ever reason  he  suffered,  we  cannot  make  any- 
thing of  his  character  if  we  do  not  allow  that 
there  was  some  purpose — some  one  great  pur- 
pose we  would  like  to  say — in  his  life.  Let 
him  have  been  but  human,  and  let  that  purpose 
be  but  the  practice  of  a  simple  ethical  princi- 
ple. This,  surely,  is  the  least  that  we  can 
claim  as  a  starting  point  for  all  that  attached 
itself  to  him  later. 

Now  let  Paul  or  the  Evangelists  come 
along,  and  change  the  person  of  this  human 
Jesus  into  that  of  God,  and  his  purpose  from 
a  simple  ethical  principle  to  that  of  the  high- 
est religious  significance — the  salvation  of  the 
world.  I  say  change  it  from  man  to  God,  be- 
cause when  Weiss  speaks  of  Paul's  intermedi- 
ate stage,  he  is  simply  toning  the  real  question 
down  to  make  it  appear  less  abrupt.  Paul's 
Jesus  is  simply  God  like  that  of  John  and  the 
Synoptists,  as  previous  papers  have  already 
shown.  And  this  immense  change  has  to  be 
made  in  forty  years !  And  it  has  to  be  made 
so  completely  that  the  Gospels  may  incor- 
porate it  at  the  end  of  that  time  without  being 


Is   Jesus    God?  107 

in  any  way  contradicted.  Further  note,  this 
change  has  to  be  effected  in  the  very  country, 
in  the  first  place,  where  Jesus  had  lived  his  sim- 
ple life,  and  in  the  second  place,  in  the  lifetime 
of  whole  communities  that  had  known  him 
personally.  You  have  to  admit  this  cannot  be 
done;  however  your  feeling  against  the  super- 
natural objects  to  an  incarnation,  your  sense 
of  the  historically  possible  rejects  this  radical 
change  still  more.  We  answer  Baur  in  his 
own  words:  "What  cannot  happen,  simply  did 
not  happen,"  and  here  we  hope  it  is  said  more 
correctly  than  he  said  it,  for  here  there  is  no 
question  of  the  supernatural.  It  would  even 
seem  more  logical  to  deny,  with  Drews,  that 
Jesus  ever  lived,  than  to  let  him  live  and  be 
deified  thirty  years  after  his  death,  if  he  did 
not  claim  deity  for  himself.  I  leave  it  to  you 
whether  that  claim  was  true  or  false,  but  you 
must  at  least  grant  that  the  subsequent  course 
of  events  requires  that  it  was  made. 

Coming  to  the  literary  argument,  we  have 
to  admit  at  once,  as  Denney  and  Anderson, 
quoted  above,  have  done  with  vastly  different 
purposes,  that  we  simply  cannot  come  into 
touch  with  Jesus  as  he  lived  and  spoke,  through 


108  Is   Jesus   God? 

the  Gospels,  and  yet  independently  of  the 
writers.  If  you  take  the  whole  matter  out  of 
the  historical  environment,  you  have  to  con- 
fess that  the  historical  Jesus,  if  he  ever  lived, 
is  at  the  mercy  of  the  writers  who  can  let  him 
act  and  speak  as  they  like,  and  create  for  him 
a  character  and  self-consciousness  just  as  suits 
their  ulterior  purposes.  Unless  we  have  writ- 
ings which  we  can  prove  to  have  come  directly 
from  the  hand  of  our  Lord,  we  cannot  find 
him  speaking  to  us  more  directly  than  he  does 
in  the  Gospels.  Now  this  may  make  investi- 
gation difficult  for  us  if  we  try  to  come  into 
closer  contact  with  the  primitive  Jesus,  but 
it  makes  it  impossible  for  the  liberal  theolo- 
gian to  separate  the  primitive  Jesus  from  the 
picture  of  him  given  in  the  Gospels. 

We  have  already  seen  that  the  Evangelists 
would  have  been  prevented  by  the  surround- 
ings in  which  they  labored  from  representing 
Jesus  differently  from  what  he  appeared  to 
all  men  to  be.  When  we  look  at  the  writers 
themselves  we  feel  convinced  of  their  ability, 
and  desire,  to  give  a  true  representation  of 
Christ  as  he  appeared  to  them.  Two  of  them 
are  supposed  to  have  followed  him  as  dis- 


Is   Jesus    God?  109 

ciples,  catching  up  every  word  eagerly;  three 
of  them  are  connected  with  the  apostolic  cir- 
cle in  which  the  Christian  religion  was  carried 
on;  Luke,  a  man  with  the  highest  historical 
sense,  had  every  opportunity  of  ascertaining 
the  facts  from  the  beginning,  and  he  too  is 
actively  employed  in  the  work  of  the  propaga- 
tion of  the  new  faith.  All  these  claims  to 
qualifications  to  give  a  true  account  the  lib- 
erals may  deny,  but  they  will  have  to  admit 
that  here  are  four  leaders  of  the  early  Church 
who  give  these  mutually  corroborative  ac- 
counts of  the  life  and  teaching  of  Jesus.  These 
accounts  show  very  marked  differences  from 
each  other,  which  are  clearly  due  in  part  to 
the  differences  in  the  natures  of  the  four  writ- 
ers to  whom  different  points  appeal,  and  in 
part  to  the  fact  that  the  object  in  writing  their 
Gospels  was  not  always  the  same.  Yet  among 
all  this  variety  there  is  this  essential  agree- 
ment running  through  the  whole,  in  regard, 
namely,  to  the  person  of  Christ,  that  he  is 
represented  as  teaching  his  own  deity,  and 
showing  it  forth  even  more  clearly  in  his 
actions  than  in  his  words. 

If  I  may  revert  to  the  instance  of  the  faked 


no  Is   Jesus    God? 

photograph  mentioned  above,  I  would  sug- 
gest that  if  the  said  Mr.  Gompers  had  been 
photographed  from  the  four  quarters  by  dif- 
ferent parties  as  he  stood  on  the  flag,  and  if 
these  photographs,  falling  into  the  hands  of 
the  liberal  police,  showed  the  very  same  scene 
from  such  different  angles,  it  would  have  gone 
hard  with  the  socialist.  He  would  never  have 
been  able  to  prove  that  they  were  all  faked. 
So  with  the  portraits  given  us  by  the  Evangel- 
ists. We  agree  with  the  liberals  that  they  give 
us  the  same  complete  man  in  the  same  sur- 
roundings. But  now  each  of  the  four  adds  to 
this  the  attribute  of  complete  deity,  and  that 
not  as  an  external  flag — a  badge  of  office  or 
what  you  like — but  as  a  second  nature,  com- 
pletely present  in  his  person,  and  so  perfectly 
united  in  the  manifestation  of  that  person 
with  his  human  nature,  that,  although  a  child 
can  distinguish  the  two,  the  most  severe  criti- 
cism cannot  separate  them.  Can  these  por- 
traits be  faked?  If  the  police  had  put  this 
question  to  different  experts,  and  shown  them 
the  four  photographs  mentioned,  and  if  these 
experts  had  then  unanimously  agreed  that  they 
were  indeed  faked,  but  one  had  told  us  that 


Is   Jesus    God?  1 1 1 

the  faked  part  was  from  the  knees  downward, 
while  another  held  that  only  the  ankles  had 
been  added  with  the  flag,  why,  there  would 
have  been  no  case  at  all! 

And  so  the  liberals  have  gone  up  and  down 
the  Gospel  portrait  to  find  the  junction  be- 
tween the  true  and  the  false.  And  they  claim 
persistently  that  they  have  found  it,  and  that 
all  over  the  place,  but  exactly  where  they  can- 
not decide.  And  they  never  will  be  able  to 
tell,  for  the  simple  reason  that  there  is  a  super- 
natural unity  here.  To  us  it  appears  clear 
that  the  Evangelists  are  but  giving  the  beauti- 
ful portrait  as  truly  as  they  can,  just  as  it  ap- 
peared to  them,  and  usually  without  even  ask- 
ing the  question  whether  Christ  really  was 
God. 

I  have  admitted  that  it  is  well-nigh  impossi- 
ble from  a  purely  literary  standpoint  to  prove 
either  the  agreement  or  the  difference  between 
the  historical  Jesus  and  the  Christ  of  the  Gos- 
pels. But  there  are  a  few  points  which  en- 
courage us  to  decide  from  the  Gospels  them- 
selves that  their  writers  intended  to  report  ac- 
curately the  historical  facts  which  they  recall. 
So  the  writers  in  their  desire  for  accuracy  give 


112  Is   Jesus    God? 

us  some  of  the  words  of  Jesus  which  they  ad- 
mit they  did  not  understand,  but  which  they 
evidently  wish  to  recall  as  exactly  as  possible. 
For  example,  Luke  ix.,  44,  45  :  "He  said  unto 
them,  the  Son  of  Man  shall  be  delivered  up 
into  the  hands  of  men.  But  they  understood 
not  this  saying,  and  it  was  concealed  from 
them  that  they  should  not  perceive  it,  and 
they  were  afraid  to  ask  him  about  this  say- 
ing." This  and  the  half-dozen  parallel  pass- 
ages serve  to  show  the  desire  of  the  Gospel 
writers  not  to  alter  any  part  of  the  truth,  even 
if  it  is  to  their  own  detriment  to  state  it.  They 
record  facts  that  were  evidence  of  their  own 
weakness  and  faults.  This  they  do  without 
excuse  or  apology.  As  artlessly  as  children 
these  men,  so  engrossed  in  their  message,  give 
details  which  place  them  in  a  bad  light.  Their 
own  reputations  are  not  considered,  as  they 
forget  themselves  in  the  work  of  witnessing 
to  such  events.  They  record  reproofs  of  Jesus 
to  themselves  because  of  ignorance,  as:  "Are 
ye  so  without  understanding?"  (Mark  vii., 
18;  Matt,  xv.,  16).  They  record  how  they 
misunderstood  him,  and  how  he  reproved 
them  for  forgetting  the  miracle  of  the  loaves 


Is   Jesus    God?  113 

and  the  fishes.  They  tell  us  freely  of  the  dis- 
graceful scene  of  James  and  John  and  their 
mother  seeking  ambitiously  the  chief  place  in 
Christ's  kingdom.  They  tell  of  the  rebuke 
of  Christ  to  them.  They  show  how  they  had 
in  their  cowardice  fled  at  the  arrest  of  Jesus. 
Peter  was  one  of  the  most  prominent  apostles ; 
yet  his  failures  and  faults  are  fully  exposed. 
All  record  his  great  denial.  They  tell  how 
they  were  slow  to  understand,  even  after  the 
resurrection,  and  so  in  every  way  they  give  the 
simple  truth  as  it  appeared  to  them  even  if 
it  does  harm  their  reputation.  It  seems  to 
us  impossible  that  these  men,  who  were  so 
careful  about  such  details,  could  mislead  us 
in  a  matter  so  fundamental  as  the  question 
under  discussion. 

If  you  grant  us  that  the  Gospels  represent 
Jesus  as  teaching  his  deity,  we  must  conclude 
that  Jesus  really  did  do  so. 


IS  CHRIST  GOD? 

First  Essay. 

By  Gerrit  Hoeksema. 

The  question  now  before  us  is,  Is  Christ 
God?  It  will  of  course  be  impossible  to  give 
this  subject  anything  like  a  complete  treatment 
in  the  space  at  disposal.  We  must  leave  un- 
touched much  material  that  might  be  mar- 
shalled in  defence  of  the  Christian  faith  in 
the  deity  of  Christ.  We  shall  seek  only  to 
develop  to  a  certain  extent  a  few  points. 

It  will  be  necessary  at  the  outset  to  say  a 
few  words  as  to  the  data  that  can  serve  as  the 
basis  of  our  argument.  Our  question  must  be 
considered  not  from  the  standpoint  of  faith 
but  of  pure  reason.  We  can  therefore  use 
only  such  data  as  ought,  in  fairness,  to  be  ad- 
mitted by  all  candid  historical  students.  The 
papers  on  the  previous  questions  give  us  val- 
uable results  upon  which  any  consideration  of 
the  present  question  must  be  based.  It  has 
been  proved  that  the  Christian  Church  has  al- 

114 


Is   Jesus    God?  115 

ways  taught  the  deity  of  Christ,  that  the  New 
Testament  writers  uniformly  speak  of  him  as 
God,  and  that  Christ  himself  claimed  to  be 
God.  And  now  the  question  before  us  is,  Is 
Christ  actually  what  he  claimed  to  be  and  was 
believed  to  be  by  his  followers? 

It  will  be  of  importance  first  of  all  to  ascer- 
tain just  how  much  we  have  a  right  to  assume 
has  been  proved  by  the  papers  on  the  immedi- 
ately preceding  question.  A  positive  answer 
to  the  question,  Did  Christ  teach  his  own 
deity?  implies,  of  course,  the  historicity  of  the 
Jesus  of  the  Gospels.  Jesus'  claims  to  deity 
are  not  the  fabrication  of  his  followers,  but  he 
actually  made  these  claims.  This  does  not, 
however,  imply  that  everything  said  of  him  in 
the  Gospels  is  true.  Jesus  might  have  made 
these  claims  and  yet  in  many  other  respects  not 
have  been  what  the  Gospels  represent  him  to 
be.  We  have  no  right  to  assume  for  instance, 
without  further  argument,  that  Jesus  actually 
worked  miracles  or  that  he  rose  from  the 
grave,  and  then  upon  these  as  yet  unproved 
facts  base  our  argument  that  he  must  have 
been  God.  There  has  not  even  been  proved 
to  us  a  divine  or  Messianic  consciousness  in 


n6  Is   Jesus    God? 

Jesus,  for  this  would  imply  that  Christ  made 
these  claims  sincerely,  and  of  course  this  has 
not  been  proved.  The  only  thing  proved  is 
that  Christ  claimed  to  be  God. 

A  very  important  question  to  consider  in 
connection  with  this  subject,  a  question  that 
must  be  settled  before  we  can  proceed  further, 
is  this:  Is  that  side  of  the  Gospel  representa- 
tion of  Jesus  which  pictures  him  as  a  man,  the 
human  side  of  that  picture,  historically  trust- 
worthy? If  we  can  establish  this  it  will  be 
much  easier  to  argue  plausibly  that  Christ 
must  have  been  divine.  This  historical  trust- 
worthiness is,  however,  not  necessarily  proved 
by  a  positive  answer  to  the  previous  question. 
Christ  might  easily  have  claimed  to  be  God 
and  yet  in  many  other  respects,  even  as  regards 
his  human  nature,  not  have  been  what  the  Gos- 
pel writers  picture  him  to  be.  In  this  paper 
we  propose  to  assume,  however,  that  the  man 
Jesus  actually  spoke  and  acted  as  he  is  repre- 
sented to  us  in  the  Gospels.  We  do  this  for 
the  following  reasons : 

First,  the  papers  on  the  previous  question 
have  proved  the  general  trustworthiness  of 
the  Gospel  writers  as  historians.     And  there 


Is   Jesus    God?  117 

can  be  no  doubt  whatever  that  everybody,  crit- 
ics included,  would  accept  the  Gospels  as  re- 
liable historical  documents  if  they  had  pic- 
tured to  us  a  merely  human  Jesus. 

Secondly,  the  previous  papers  have  conclu- 
sively proved  that  it  is  impossible  to  get  back 
of  the  Gospels  to  a  still  more  primitive  Jesus. 
Many  critics  now  openly  admit  this.  Even 
those  who  believe  in  a  merely  human  Jesus  will 
have  to  choose  between  the  man  Jesus  of  the 
Gospels  or  no  Jesus  at  all.  And  since  the 
proposition  that  Christ  claimed  to  be  God 
necessarily  implies  his  historical  existence,  we 
must  accept  the  Gospel  picture  in  so  far  as  this 
represents  Jesus  as  a  man  among  men. 

Finally,  from  the  critics'  own  standpoint, 
the  human  side  of  the  Gospel  portrait  ought 
to  be  absolutely  reliable.  For  they  tell  us  that 
the  early  Christians  made  a  divine  Jesus  out 
of  a  human  Jesus.  And  the  remarkable  thing 
is  that  in  these  documents  whose  avowed  pur- 
pose it  is  to  exhibit  a  divine  Jesus,  we  find  a 
large  mass  of  historical  material  that  points 
not  to  a  divine  but  to  a  human  Jesus.  Of 
course  it  is  impossible  to  attribute  this  incor- 
poration of  seemingly  contradictory  material 


n8  Is   Jesus    Godf 

to  carelessness  or  naivete  on  the  part  of  the 
authors.  The  Gospel  portrait  of  Christ  is  too 
great  a  masterpiece.  No,  the  critics  will  have 
to  admit  that  nothing  but  absolute  honesty,  ab- 
solute regard  for  the  historical  facts,  could 
have  made  the  Gospel  writers  incorporate  into 
their  picture  a  mass  of  material  which  seems 
to  contradict  their  avowed  purpose. 

Now  it  may  seem  as  if  it  will  avail  us  very 
little  in  attempting  to  prove  the  deity  of  Christ 
to  prove  the  trustworthiness  of  the  Gospel  pic- 
ture of  his  human  nature.  And  yet  it  is  of 
the  greatest  importance,  for  the  simple  reason 
that  the  human  Jesus  given  us  by  the  Gos- 
pels is  such  a  man  as  could  not  possibly  have 
falsely  claimed  divine  honor.  In  other  words, 
Jesus  is  such  a  man  that  if  he  claimed  to  be 
God,  we  must  allow  that  he  was  God.  For  if 
Jesus  were  a  mere  man, — or  anything  we  may 
believe  him  to  be,  not  God, — then  one  of  two 
things  must  be  said  of  him.  Either  he  be- 
lieved his  own  claims  or  he  did  not  believe 
them.  Either  his  mind  was  clouded  by  the 
most  absurd  and  most  irrational  illusion  that 
ever  darkened  mortal  mind,  or  he  was  the 
greatest  religious  impostor  in  history.     Both 


Is   Jesus    God?  119 

of  these  suppositions  are  impossible,  are  in 
flagrant  contradiction  to  all  the  historical  evi- 
dence. 

The  latter  supposition,  that  Christ  made 
these  high  claims  in  spite  of  his  clear  con- 
sciousness that  he  was  not  God,  needs  very 
little  refutation.  Christ's  whole  life  refutes 
this  view,  and  this  theory  finds  very  few,  if 
any,  defenders  in  our  day.  It  is  too  self-evi- 
dent to  friend  and  foe  alike  that  the  Jesus  of 
the  Gospels,  whatever  he  may  have  been,  was 
not  a  coarse  impostor.  All  his  words  and 
works  breathe  uprightness,  frankness,  a  sin- 
cere love  of  truth,  and  a  burning  hatred  of  all 
sham  and  hypocrisy.  He  who  so  fiercely  cen- 
sured the  hypocrisy  of  the  Pharisee,  who  was 
forever  demanding  of  men  that  their  outer 
manifestation  be  in  accord  with  the  inner  life 
of  their  hearts, — are  we  to  believe  that  he 
himself  was  continually  making  claims  which 
he  knew  were  false  ?  Supposing  for  a  moment 
that  this  theory  were  true,  then  surely  Christ 
must  have  had  some  purpose  in  making  these 
claims.  Do  the  Gospels  give  us  any  clue  to 
this  supposed  purpose?  Do  they  not  rather 
picture  to  us  a  humble  man,  who  peacefully 


120  Is    Jesus    God? 

and  unconcernedly  goes  his  way,  avoiding  the 
popular  favor  and  never  profiting  by  the  pas- 
sions of  the  multitude?  We  never  see  Christ 
trying  forcibly  to  impress  upon  men's  minds 
that  they  must  recognize  him  as  God  as  we 
would  expect  of  an  impostor.  On  the  con- 
trary, when  Peter  in  the  name  of  all  the  dis- 
ciples utters  his  great  confession  of  faith  in 
Christ  as  the  Son  of  the  living  God,  Jesus 
sternly  commands  them  not  to  speak  of  it  to 
the  masses.  And  if  more  proof  were  needed, 
would  Christ  have  died  for  this  self-evident 
lie?  Do  not  his  passion,  his  crucifixion,  his 
death,  prove  beyond  all  doubt  that  Jesus, 
whatever  he  may  have  been,  was  certainly  sin- 
cere in  his  claims? 

Driven  to  this  admission,  and  of  course  un- 
willing to  confess  that  Christ  was  God,  recent 
critics  now  picture  to  us  a  Jesus  who  was  the 
victim  of  religious  illusions.  His  was  a  very 
religious  nature,  they  tell  us ;  he  lived  in  closer 
communion  with  God  than  any  other  mortal 
ever  did;  and  gradually  the  illusion  grew  on 
him  that  he  was  in  some  way  God  himself. 
Now  the  word,  illusion,  is  a  very  nice  word 
and  is  purposely  selected  by  the  critics.    But  if 


Is   Jesus   God?  121 

their  theory  were  true,  a  harsher  and  more 
terrible  word  would  be  needed  to  describe 
Jesus'  psychological  condition.  He  would 
then  be  no  longer  a  normal-minded  man  whose 
harmless  illusions  about  his  divinity  leave  his 
mental  soundness  intact.  No,  he  would  be  an 
insane  fanatic.  And  it  is  between  these  two, — 
a  divine  Jesus  or  an  insane  Jesus, — that  we 
have  to  choose. 

The  critics  of  course  protest  loudly  against 
the  description  of  their  so-called  historical 
Jesus  as  an  insane  person.  But  if  we  look  the 
facts  honestly  and  squarely  in  the  face,  we  can 
come  to  no  other  conclusion.  In  order  to 
bring  the  question  directly  home  to  us,  let  us 
suppose  that  a  young  man  from  the  humbler 
ranks  of  society  were  to  appear  among  us  and 
in  calm  but  decisive  language  claim  that  he 
was  God.  Let  us  suppose,  moreover,  that  this 
idea  was  not  a  transient,  temporary  fancy,  but, 
as  was  the  case  with  Christ,  a  firm,  unshaken 
belief  that  seemed  to  reach  down  to  the  inner- 
most roots  of  his  life  and  controlled  all  his 
words  and  actions.  Let  us  add  a  few  more  of 
the  historical  touches  seen  in  Christ's  life.  This 
young  man  would  then  say  that  whoever  had 


122  Is   Jesus    God? 

seen  him  had  seen  the  Father,  that  is,  God 
himself.  He  would  claim  that  at  the  end  of 
the  world  he  would  come  upon  the  clouds  of 
heaven,  escorted  by  heaven's  angels,  and  in  all 
the  splendor  of  divine  majesty  judge  the  quick 
and  the  dead.  Would  any  doubt  that  such  a 
young  man  was  insane,  always,  of  course,  on 
the  supposition  that  he  was  a  mere  man? 
Would  the  critics  themselves  doubt  it?  Would 
not  everybody,  critics  included,  laugh  in  deri- 
sion at  any  one  who  prophesied  that  this  young 
man  was  to  become  the  founder  of  a  literally 
world-conquering  movement,  and  that  within 
fifty  years  of  his  death  thousands  would  rather 
shed  their  life's  blood  than  renounce  their 
faith  in  his  deity? 

We  have  no  right  to  apply  two  standards 
of  insanity,  one  for  our  age  and  one  for  the 
age  in  which  Christ  lived.  If  such  a  young 
man  appearing  among  us  is  to  be  declared  in- 
sane, we  must  be  ready  to  say  the  same  thing 
of  Jesus.  The  fact  that  Jesus  lived  nineteen 
hundred  years  ago  must  not  be  allowed  to  ob- 
scure the  issue.  We  must  not  permit  the  crit- 
ics with  their  literary  and  rhetorical  subtleties 
to  soften  down  the  altogether  extraordinary 


Is   Jesus    God?  123 

and  stupendous  character  of  Christ's  claims. 
We  have  here  no  mere  mental  exaltation,  no 
partial  illusion,  no  temporary  enthusiasm;  no, 
the  firmly  rooted  belief  of  a  mere  man  that  he 
was  God  would  imply  a  complete  subversion 
of  his  whole  normal  consciousness.  It  would 
be  a  crass  contradiction  of  the  deepest  intui- 
tions of  our  nature.  To  a  normal  man,  noth- 
ing is  more  certain  than  that  he  is  a  mere  man, 
and  nothing  is  further  from  his  mind  than  the 
illusion  that  he  is  a  God. 

And  yet  the  critics  would  have  us  believe 
that  a  mere  man  could  firmly  believe  this  and 
still  not  be  insane.  If  a  poor  man  were  to  be- 
lieve himself  very  rich,  and  if  this  were  an 
unshaken  belief  for  which  he  were  willing  to 
die  if  necessary,  men  would  unanimously  pro- 
nounce him  insane.  Why?  For  the  simple 
reason  that  he  believed  himself  to  be  the  very 
opposite  of  what  he  actually  was.  But  surely 
the  difference  between  God  and  man  is  in- 
finitely greater  than  the  difference  between 
rich  and  poor.  And  we  must  remember  that 
Jesus  himself, — this  even  the  critics  will  ad- 
mit,— had  a  very  exalted  idea  of  God.  He 
must  have  realized  very  clearly  what  an  im- 


124  Is   Jesus    God? 

passable  gulf  separated  God  and  man.  And 
therefore  the  illusion  on  his  part  that  he  was 
God  would  be  a  much  greater  illusion  than 
that  of  a  poor  man  imagining  himself  rich. 
And  if  the  latter  is  to  be  pronounced  insane, 
then  surely  Christ's  unshaken  but  mistaken 
belief  in  his  Godhead  would  have  carried  with 
it  an  even  greater  degree  of  insanity. 

And  in  point  of  fact  the  critics  themselves 
practically  admit  this.  Renan,  for  instance,  in 
his  Life  of  Jesus,  protests  against  the  terms 
insanity  and  madness  as  descriptive  of  Jesus' 
psychological  state.  But  all  his  protests  are 
in  vain.  Lepin  in  his  criticism  of  Renan's  de- 
scription of  Jesus'  psychological  condition 
says:  "The  word  insanity  naturally  very  often 
occurs  to  his  mind  and  very  often  slips  from 
his  pen.  The  words  madness  and  insanity  he 
disclaims,  but  still  somewhat  insists  upon  the 
fact  itself.'* 

But  when  this  fact  has  been  once  estab- 
lished, that  Christ  if  he  were  not  God  must 
have  been  insane,  it  is  fraught  with  tremen- 
dous consequences.  For  nothing  can  be  more 
certain  to  an  unprejudiced  mind  than  that  the 
Jesus  of  the  Gospels  was  not  insane,  was  in- 


Is   Jesus    God?  125 

deed  the  sanest  and  soberest  of  men.  We 
quote  here  merely  the  opinions  of  two  of  the 
critics,  who  can  certainly  not  be  suspected  of 
being  biased  in  favor  of  Jesus  or  the  belief  in 
his  divinity.  Wernle  says,  "Jesus  is  always 
modest,  humble,  sane,  and  sober."  Harnack 
recognizes  that  Jesus  "is  possessed  of  a  quiet, 
uniform,  collected  demeanor,  with  everything 
directed  toward  one  goal.  He  never  uses  any 
ecstatic  language  and  the  tone  of  stirring 
prophecy  is  rare.  Entrusted  with  the  greatest 
of  all  missions,  his  eye  and  ear  are  open  to 
every  impression  of  the  life  around  him,  a 
proof  of  intense  calm  and  absolute  certainty." 
Nothing  is  more  striking  in  Christ  than  his 
calmness,  his  serenity,  his  absolute  mastery  of 
himself  and  all  the  circumstances  of  his  life. 

Of  course  the  objection  could  be  made  here 
that  Jesus  may  have  been  insane  on  this  one 
point  only,  namely,  his  deity,  and  that  this  did 
not  affect  the  rest  of  his  inner  soul-life  or  its 
outward  manifestation  in  any  way.  But  this 
view,  aside  from  its  intrinsic  improbability, 
finds  no  support  whatever  in  the  Gospels.  We 
do  not  find  that  the  Jesus  who  speaks  about  his 
deity  is  an  altogether  different  man  from  what 


126  Is   Jesus    God? 

he  is  at  other  times  when  this  idea  is  not 
brought  into  the  foreground.  There  is  always 
the  same  prudent  reserve,  the  same  balanced 
temperament,  the  same  deep  calm.  It  is  sim- 
ply an  impossibility  to  see  in  the  Jesus  of  the 
Gospels  the  hallucination  or  soul-frenzy  that 
the  critics  ascribe  to  him.  Moreover,  the 
whole  theory  of  a  more  or  less  insane  Jesus 
becomes  ridiculous  when  we  look  at  the  results 
of  Christ's  work.  His  philosophy  of  religion 
has  eclipsed  all  ancient  systems  and  he  is  ad- 
mittedly the  greatest  moral  teacher  of  man- 
kind. Among  his  disciples  through  all  the 
ages  are  to  be  found  many  of  the  world's 
keenest,  sanest,  and  deepest  minds.  Renan 
himself  admits  that  the  madman  never  suc- 
ceeds. "It  has  not  yet  been  given,"  he  says, 
"to  mental  aberration  to  act  seriously  upon 
the  progress  of  mankind."  But  Jesus  Christ 
did  succeed.  The  spirit  of  Jesus  Christ  is  the 
genius  of  the  civilization  of  the  Occident. 
Christianity  is  interwoven  into  the  very  woof 
and  fibre  of  our  institutions  and  it  is  impossi- 
ble to  believe  that  back  of  our  splendid  civil- 
ization stands  nothing  better  than  the  soul- 
frenzy  of  an  insane  religious  enthusiast. 


Is   Jesus    God?  127 

There  is  still  another  insurmountable  objec- 
tion, aside  from  the  insanity  which  such  claims 
would  involve,  to  the  view  that  Jesus  was  a 
mere  man  who  labored  under  the  delusion  that 
he  was  God.  No  one  can  read  the  Gospels 
and  fail  to  be  impressed  with  the  deep  humil- 
ity toward  God  which  Jesus  always  manifest- 
ed. He  may  justly  be  called  the  most  humble 
of  men.  But,  we  ask,  how  is  this  to  be  recon- 
ciled with  his  firm  conviction  that  he  himself 
was  God?  Of  course  the  Christian  Church 
offers  a  solution  of  the  problem  with  its  doc- 
trine of  the  Two  Natures.  But  the  critics  in- 
sist on  the  view  that  Christ  was  a  mere  man, 
a  single  personality  existing  within  the  confines 
of  a  single  nature.  They  mean  to  tell  us  that 
a  mere  man  firmly  believed  that  he  was  God, 
and  at  the  same  time  felt  the  deepest  humility 
towards  God.  Can  a  better  example  be  found 
of  a  contradiction  in  terms?  Would  not  that 
insane  trait  in  Christ's  psychological  make-up 
that  made  possible  his  self-deifying  illusion,  at 
the  same  time  have  swept  away  the  last  vestige 
of  creaturely  humility?  Surely  it  is  the  merest 
truism  to  say  that  a  being  existing  in  but  one 
nature  cannot  fancy  himself  God  and  never- 


128  Is   Jesus    God? 

theless  feel  humble  as  a  creature  before  the 
very  Being  he  imagines  himself  to  be.  This 
view  of  a  delusionist  Jesus  contradicts  not 
only  history,  but  also  sound  psychology.  A 
being  who  feels  that  he  is  the  eternal  God, 
and  yet  humbles  himself  before  that  God, — 
either  such  a  being  never  existed  or  he  existed 
in  two  natures,  human  and  divine.  No  single 
nature  can  contain  within  itself  such  contra- 
dictions. 

Indeed,  this  contradiction  between  Christ's 
humility  and  his  claims  to  deity  finds  numer- 
ous parallels  in  the  contrast  that  runs  through 
the  whole  Gospel  representation  of  Christ,  a 
contrast  that  amounts  to  absurdity  and  impos- 
sibility on  the  supposition  that  he  was  a  mere 
man. 

As  an  acute  critic  of  the  critics  says,  the  Jesus 
of  the  critics  is  at  the  same  time  humble  and 
proud,  acute-minded  and  weak-minded,  sober 
and  fanatical.  And  it  is  safe  to  say  that  such 
a  man  never  existed,  never  could  exist,  and 
happily  for  himself  and  society,  never  will  ex- 
ist. A  humble  man  is  not  proud,  an  acute- 
minded  man  never  weak-minded,  and  a  sober- 
minded  man  never  fanatical.    Such  a  psycho- 


Is  Jesus  God?  129 

logical  monstrosity  is,  we  think,  a  psychologi- 
cal impossibility. 

Of  course,  the  critics  feel  that  these  seem- 
ing contradictions  point  strongly  in  the  direc- 
tion of  the  Church's  doctrine  of  the  two  na- 
tures of  Christ.  But  one  more  heroic  attempt 
must  be  made  to  save  Jesus  from  becoming 
divine.  And  the  latest  discoveries  or  inven- 
tions of  psychology  are  now  pointed  to  as 
more  or  less  explaining  the  mystery  of  these 
supposed  contradictions.  First  of  all,  the  phe- 
nomena of  "multiple  personality"  are  to  explain 
Jesus'  duplex  consciousness.  History  seems 
to  give  us  cases  where  two  radically  different 
personalities  are  united  in  one  person.  We 
must  remember,  however,  that  no  substance 
can  be  less  than  any  or  all  of  its  component 
elements,  that  no  integral  unity  can  be  split 
up  into  parts,  any  or  all  of  which  are  to  be 
greater  than  this  unity  itself.  If  we  keep  this 
in  mind,  it  will  immediately  be  seen  that  when 
we  are  pointed  to  the  above-mentioned  phe- 
nomena to  explain  the  seeming  contradictions 
of  Christ's  nature,  we  have  before  us  a  very 
good  example  of  what  is  called  "begging  the 
question."    Suppose  that  these  phenomena  do 


130  Is  Jesus  God? 

offer  parallels.  The  question  still  remains, 
How  must  we  explain  one  of  these  personali- 
ties in  Christ,  that  which  is  represented  by  his 
divine  consciousness?  Christ's  claims  to  deity 
cannot  be  explained  as  fraud  or  hallucination. 
This,  as  we  have  seen,  contradicts  the  Gospel 
picture.  If  it  cannot  be  this,  we  are  of  course 
driven  to  the  conclusion  that  we  have  here  a 
real  essentially  divine  consciousness.  Now  since 
part  cannot  be  greater  than  the  whole,  we 
must  conclude  that  the  unity  that  unites  these 
two  personalities  in  Christ,  his  human  and 
divine  personality,  cannot  be  less  than  God 
either.  We  therefore  still  face  the  same 
problem. 

Two  other  phenomena  are  pointed  to  as 
explaining  Jesus'  psychological  state,  the  sub- 
liminal self  and  the  alternating  personality. 
Neither  of  these,  however,  is  applicable  to  the 
historical  Jesus.  According  to  the  latter,  Jesus 
would  have  been  entirely  unconscious  of  his 
divinity  and  the  "subliminal  self"  theory 
would  relegate  his  divinity,  if  not  to  the  un- 
conscious, then  at  least  to  the  sub-conscious. 
Both  of  which  views  have  nothing  whatever 
to  do  with  the  historical  Jesus,  who  is  clearly 


Is  Jesus  God?  131 

and  continuously  conscious  of  his  divine  na- 
ture. They  cannot  possibly  explain  Christ, 
because  they  contradict  or  disregard  the  plain 
facts  concerning  him. 

In  a  word,  then,  the  critics  have  failed  to 
explain  on  their  view  the  only  Jesus  known 
to  history.  We  have  devoted  much  time  to 
the  question  of  the  explanation  of  the  histori- 
cal Jesus,  because  we  believe  that,  if  anything, 
the  historical  facts  ought  to  wring  from  the 
critics  the  perhaps  unwilling  admission  that 
Christ  must  have  been  God.  We  have  here 
before  us  a  truly  remarkable  fact.  Here  is 
Jesus  of  Nazareth,  of  whom  the  critics  are 
certain  that  he  was  not  God.  And  yet,  on 
this  hypothesis,  namely,  that  he  was  not  God, 
he  cannot  be  explained.  He  baffles  the  keenest 
psychological  and  historical  analysis  of  those 
who  are  most  anxious  to  explain  him  as  a  mere 
man.  We  think  it  a  fairly  safe  proposition,  to 
which  the  critics  ought  to  be  willing  to  agree, 
that  if  there  is  but  one  possible  explanation  of 
any  phenomenon,  that  must  be  the  correct  ex- 
planation. If  every  theory  of  Christ's  person 
on  the  hypothesis  that  he  was  not  God  proves 
to  be  a  flagrant  contradiction  of  history,  then 


132  Is  Jesus  God? 

it  is  safe  to  say  that  this  hypothesis  contradicts 
history.  And  if  we  cannot  believe  that  he 
was  not  God,  we  must  believe  that  he  was 
God.  The  critics  may  try  to  explain  away 
many  things,  his  sinlessness,  his  miracles,  his 
resurrection.  But  they  cannot  explain  away 
their  own  failure  to  explain  him.  Their  own 
failure  is  the  strongest  proof  that  Christ's 
deity  is  the  only  key  that  can  unlock  the  mys- 
teries of  Christ's  personality. 

In  conclusion,  we  may  also  ask,  How  are 
the  critics  to  explain  the  results  of  Christ's 
work,  especially  the  truly  remarkable  fact  that 
many  who  had  known  Christ  in  the  flesh,  who 
had  seen  him  as  a  man  among  men,  after- 
wards believed  in  his  Godhead?  It  must  not 
be  supposed  for  a  moment  that  this  singular 
phenomenon  can  be  explained  by  pointing  to 
the  fact  that  history  gives  us  other  instances 
of  men  being  honored  as  gods.  There  are  a 
few  considerations  that  lift  the  faith  of  the 
early  Christian  community  in  the  deity  of 
Christ  to  an  absolutely  unique  position,  to 
which  not  even  a  distant  parallel  can  be  found. 

First  of  all,  we  must  remember  the  strong 
monotheism  of  the  Jewish  nation.    The  Jews 


1  Is  Jesus  God?  133 

were  the  only  nation  in  the  world  at  that  time 
who  believed  in  one  Almighty  God  of  heaven 
and  earth.  And  they  had  the  most  exalted 
idea  of  his  greatness  and  majesty.  It  is  com- 
paratively easy  to  explain  how  the  Romans, 
with  their  polytheism,  could  deify  some  of 
their  emperors  and  give  them  divine  honor. 
But  this  is  in  no  way  an  analogy  to  the  faith 
of  the  early  Christians  in  the  deity  of  their 
Lord.  For  the  Jew,  the  mere  suggestion  of 
claiming  divine  honor  was  blasphemy.  We 
see  the  high  priest  rending  his  clothes  when 
Christ  claims  that  he  is  the  Son  of  God.  Hon- 
oring a  mere  man  as  God  was  the  very  last 
thing  a  Jew  would  think  of  doing;  indeed,  we 
might  almost  say,  a  real  Jew,  in  the  full  pos- 
session of  his  senses,  could  not  do  so.  And 
we  may  add,  Jesus  was  the  very  last  man  of 
whom  they  would  think  of  believing  such  a 
thing.  We  must  never  forget  that  Christ  dis- 
appointed the  deepest  longing  of  the  whole 
Jewish  nation,  the  longing  for  an  earthly  Mes- 
siah. Not  the  crown  of  divine  honor,  but  the 
cross  of  shame,  was  what  the  Jew  presented 
to  Christ.  And  so  far  from  seeing  in  him  a 
god,  they  cried:  "Crucify  him,  crucify  him." 


134  Is  Jesus  God? 

Of  course,  the  early  disciples  did  not  take  part 
in  this  crowning  injustice  to  Jesus  of  Naz- 
areth, but  we  know  that  they  too  had  hopes  of 
earthly  glory,  that  they  too  were  perplexed 
and  filled  with  doubts  and  fears,  when  they 
saw  their  Master,  of  whom  they  had  expected 
so  much,  nailed  to  the  cross  as  a  malefactor. 

And  yet  within  a  short  time  of  his  death 
they  are  preaching  a  divine  Christ.  Paul,  who 
as  a  Pharisee  deeply  hated  and  persecuted 
Jesus  of  Nazareth, — Paul,  too,  is  preaching  a 
divine  Christ.  And  Jerusalem  itself  contains 
within  its  walls  a  congregation  of  Jews  who 
bow  in  adoration  before  their  new-found  Lord 
of  Glory. 

Of  course,  attempts  have  been  made  to  as- 
cribe the  whole  thing  to  fanatical  or  insane 
enthusiasm  on  the  part  of  the  early  Christians. 
But  in  our  wonderful  New  Testament  the  first 
disciples  of  Jesus  Christ  have  left  us  a  me- 
morial that  is  simply  the  embodiment  of  san- 
ity and  soberness.  And  the  depth  and  clear- 
ness and  keen  logic  of  Paul's  mind  are  ad- 
mitted by  all  men.  Neither  secular  history 
nor  the  sacred  writings  offer  even  the  slight- 
est support  to  the  above-mentioned  theories. 


Is  Jesus  God?  135 

Here  again  the  issue  is  clear.  The  critic 
will  have  to  take  the  position  that  the  strongly 
monotheistic  Jew  who  believed  in  the  one  God 
of  heaven  and  earth,  whose  high  priest  rent 
his  clothes  at  what  he  considered  Christ's  blas- 
phemy,— that  this  Jew  believed  that  Jesus,  the 
carpenter's  son  of  Nazareth,  a  man  who  dis- 
appointed all  the  messianic  hopes  of  his  peo- 
ple, who  was  nailed  to  the  cross  as  a  male- 
factor,— that  this  Jew  in  the  full  possession  of 
his  senses,  believed  that  this  peasant  was  the 
Almighty  God  of  heaven  and  earth,  the  God 
of  his  fathers,  of  Abraham,  Isaac,  and  Jacob, 
and  that  he  believed  this  in  spite  of  the  fact 
that  there  was  not  the  slightest  evidence  of 
the  divinity  of  Christ,  and  in  spite  of  the  fact 
that  his  faith  would  arouse  the  deepest  hatred 
and  scorn  of  his  brethren  according  to  the 
flesh,  and  that  at  any  moment  he  might  have 
to  seal  his  folly  with  his  life's  blood. 

We,  on  our  part,  cannot  lay  claim  to 
such  credulity.  We  believe  that  when  sane, 
sober-minded  men  believe  the  very  last  thing 
they  would  think  of  believing,  and  believe  this 
of  the  very  last  man  of  whom  they  would  think 
of  believing  it,  there  must  be    some    reason 


136  Is  Jesus  Godf 

for  this  singular  phenomenon.  And  we  hold 
that  the  faith  of  the  early  Christians  in  the 
deity  of  Jesus  Christ  can  be  explained  only  by 
a  still  greater  miracle — the  mystery  of  mys- 
teries,— that  the  man  Jesus  of  Nazareth,  the 
lowly,  humble  man  of  sorrows,  leaning  on 
men's  bosoms  and  weeping  at  their  graves, 
was,  at  the  same  time,  the  eternal  God  of 
heaven  and  of  earth. 


Second  Essay. 

By  Luther  Moore  Bicknell. 

In  broaching  this  question  subsequently  to 
the  five  questions  that  have  already  occupied 
our  attention,  it  might  seem  that  a  very  small 
field  is  left  for  our  investigation.  On  histori- 
cal and  critical  grounds  we  have  been  shown 
quite  clearly  that  the  Church  has  always 
taught  the  deity  of  Christ;  that  the  New  Tes- 
tament writers,  and  especially  the  Evangelists,, 
were  so  impressed  with  his  deity  that  they 
have  revealed  on  almost  every  page  of  their 
record  their  deep  conviction  of  it;  and  finally, 


Is  Jesus  God?  137 

that  Jesus  himself,  walking  up  and  down 
among  men,  taught  by  declaration  and  para- 
ble, by  life  and  act,  that  he  was  from  above, 
sent  from  God' the  Father,  and  that  when  he 
was  lifted  up  he  would  draw  all  men  unto  him. 
All  we  have  to  do  apparently  is  to  conclude 
from  this  evidence  that  Jesus  is  divine  and 
our  end  is  reached. 

Our  field,  however,  though  narrow,  is  as 
deep  as  the  mind  of  God  himself.  Christ  was 
more  concerned  with  what  men  thought  of 
him  than  almost  anything  else.  He  came  to 
his  disciples  and  he  comes  to  each  of  us  with 
the  question,  What  think  ye  of  Christ?  Who 
am  I  ?  Is  Christ  God  ?  and  men's  whole  Chris- 
tian experience  depends  upon  and  is  governed 
by  their  conception  of  Jesus,  whether  he  is 
divine  or  not.  Thus  our  field  of  investigation 
becomes  metaphysical  and  personal,  rather 
than  the  already  trodden  fields  of  critical  and 
historical  investigation.  By  metaphysical  we 
do  not  mean  that  these  evidences  are  above 
human  reason  or  beyond  our  consciousness, 
but  rather  that  they  come  from  the  inner  con- 
sciousness of  men  and  from  the  mass  of  the 
world's  thought  as  revealed  in  the  conscious- 


138  Is  Jesus  God? 

ness  and  hearts  of  men  in  all  ages.  It  may  be 
held  that  conclusions  from  such  data  neces- 
sarily cannot  be  accurate  or  final,  but  in  the 
same  measure  that  all  abstract  philosophical 
thinking  is  judged  final  by  the  reason  prompt- 
ed by  faith,  so  the  final  court  of  appeals  in 
our  investigation  must  be  the  faith  in  every 
heart. 

It  is  a  tremendously  overwhelming  observa- 
tion as  we  look  over  our  field  that  faith  in 
God  and  faith  in  Christ  must  stand  or  fall  to- 
gether. There  is  no  halfway  ground, — either 
the  throne  or  the  gibbet.  The  two  extremes 
of  human  thinking  are  Theism  on  the  one 
hand,  with  a  necessary  Trinity;  or  Atheism 
on  the  other  hand,  with  an  empty  throne  in 
heaven  and  the  uncertainties  of  materialism 
on  earth.  Either  we  must  find  a  supreme 
place  for  the  divine  Saviour  or  no  place  at  all 
for  the  greatest  of  impostors. 

From  whatever  viewpoint  we  look  at  the 
evidence  for  our  Lord's  deity  we  are  im- 
pressed, first  of  all,  by  the  supernatural  ele- 
ment in  his  life.  This  is  the  element  that  is 
most  difficult  for  the  enemies  of  the  Saviour 
to   accept,   while  they  can  neither  deny  the 


Is  Jesus  God?  139 

fact  nor  explain  it.    The  supernatural  is  man- 
ifest  in   his   position   relatively   to   man   and 
God.    God  made  the  universe  with  all  its  man- 
ifestations and  developments  for  man.     He 
controls  it  by  laws  of  His  own  making.    He 
made  man  superior  to  nature  and  placed  him 
in  nature  to  subdue  and  conquer  it.    Thus  at 
the  appearance  of  man  a  new  order  was  in- 
augurated.   This  creature  endowed  with  per- 
sonal freedom  is  the  starting-point  of  a  new 
administration ;  the  moral  order  superimposes 
itself  upon  the  physical.    Nature  ceases  in  her 
development,    she    changelessly    follows    the 
cycle  of  her  seasons  and  becomes  the  soil  upon 
which  the  tree  of  history  must  grow  and  de- 
velop.    But  man  is  endowed  with  ambition 
and  zeal  for  higher  ideals — a  more  complete 
development — a    more    complete     manhood. 
Thus  we  have  two  spiritual  elements  in  the 
universe,  God  and  man.     So  God  has  made 
man  for  a  great  development  which  man  feels 
inherent  in  his  inner  consciousness;  and  God 
must  come  in  touch  with  man  to  reveal  his 
plan  of  development  and  to  reveal  himself  to 
him.     God  only  can  reveal  himself  to  man: 
the  finite  cannot  comprehend  the  infinite  save 


140  Is  Jesus  God? 

as  the  infinite  chooses  to  reveal  himself.    This 
was  God's  plan. 

But  when  this  plan  of  revelation  and 
the  plan  of  the  development  of  man  were 
interrupted  by  the  criminal  act  of  man 
which  separated  man  from  God,  and  would 
have  plunged  him,  had  he  been  left  to  himself, 
into  inevitable  ruin,  the  work  of  initiation  be- 
gun by  God  transforms  itself  into  a  work  of 
redemption.  God  no  longer  merely  reveals 
himself;  he  works  at  saving;  and  the  starting 
point  of  this  great  plan  of  redemption  is  the 
promise  of  victory  to  man  over  Satan  on  the 
threshold  of  Paradise ;  and  the  advent  of  Jesus 
Christ  is  the  goal.  He  is  the  great  Ideal 
Man  in  the  mind  of  God,  the  apex  of  man's 
development,  and  in  him  was  the  great  goal 
to  which  God  was  leading  man  in  his  devel- 
opment; a  man  made  holy  by  freedom  and  all- 
powerful  by  free  obedience.  So  this  Jesus  be- 
comes the  center  of  all  human  thinking,  the 
unique  man,  and  it  is  worthy  of  observation 
here  that  the  eyes  of  all  men  are  upon  the 
wonderful  character,  personality  and  life  of 
this  supernatural  man,  who  unites  us  as  broth- 
ers with  himself  to  God  the  Father.    As  he  is 


Is  Jesus  God?  141 

the  perfect  man,  the  ideal  of  man  realized,  so 
it  is  true  that  God  purposes  that  men  shall  be 
like  him,  he  wants  the  world  to  become  like 
him. 

So  this  great  Ideal  Man,  this  culmina- 
tion of  all  man's  hopes  and  desires,  comes  to 
man  and  reveals  to  his  yearning  heart  some- 
thing of  the  Infinite  God  himself.  We  said 
that  God  alone  can  reveal  himself  to  man. 
Jesus  Christ  comes  and  satisfies  man's  con- 
sciousness with  a  conception  of  the  depth,  the 
breadth,  and  the  height  of  God's  love,  his 
infinite  mercy,  his  sovereign  wisdom,  in  fact, 
he  reveals  the  very  God;  hence,  this  Christ 
must  be  God. 

Then  another  element  of  the  supernatural 
is  the  time  and  manner  of  his  appearance. 
There  was  nothing  in  his  antecedents  and  sur- 
roundings to  explain  his  appearance  and  radi- 
ance. There  was  nothing  in  the  soil  of  the 
sordid  and  narrow  Jewish  race  to  produce 
such  an  embodiment  of  pure  and  universal 
love.  There  was  nothing  in  the  atmosphere 
of  that  sensual,  narrow,  bigoted  age  to  beget 
or  foster  such  a  character  of  stainless  and 
complete  virtue.    It  is  true  that  it  was  an  age 


142  Ts  Jesus  God? 

of  high  enlightenment,  the  age  of  Augustus 
and  Tiberius;  an  age  when  emancipated  rea- 
son and  philosophy  were  beating  down  the 
ancient  pagan  superstitions.  But  we  are  forced 
to  believe  that  that  system  of  truth  which  of 
all  others  was  most  repugnant  to  the  way  of 
thinking  of  men  of  that  age,  lifted  up  its  head 
in  it  and  conquered  the  world.  Was  not  it 
reasonable  that  his  friends  and  disciples 
should  doubt  him?  Could  he  have  chosen  a 
more  inauspicious  time  in  which  to  reveal 
himself?  Had  his  friends  not  been  with  him 
for  years,  known  his  brothers  and  sisters, 
walked  with  him  as  traveling  companions, 
eaten  at  the  same  table  with  him,  seen  him 
suffering,  hungry,  weary,  asking  questions, 
wreeping,  groaning,  dying?  Can  we  estimate 
the  amount  of  evidence  required  to  convince 
those  simple,  narrow-minded,  monotheistic 
Jews  of  his  divinity, — that  he  was  very  God 
himself?  Yet  we  have  been  clearly  convinced 
that  they  did  so  hold  him  divine,  and  some 
died  for  that  conviction.  Can  we  reasonably 
assume  that,  "after  four  hundred  years  of 
waiting  the  germ  that  was  committed  to  the 
soil  by  the  prophets  at  last  breaks  forth  into 


Is  Jesus  God?  143 

life  and  a  Being  makes  his  appearance,  who  in 
an  exceptional  life  attained  the  ideals  of  the 
prophets  in  a  more  radiant  conception  than 
they  had  dreamed;  that  he  was  rejected  and 
murdered  by  his  own  people,  was  buried, 
arose  as  he  said,  and  goes  forth  to  conquer  the 
world  at  the  head  of  his  army  of  redeemed, 
and  is  still  working  a  greater  work  among  a 
greater  people" — can  we  dare  assume,  I  say, 
that  such  an  one  is  other  than  the  Priestly 
King,  the  revealer  of  God,  the  very  God 
himself? 

Now  in  the  second  place,  let  us  consider 
briefly  the  divine  elements  of  his  character. 
Horace  Bushnell  says  that  "the  character  of 
Jesus  forbids  classification  with  men."  Jesus 
did  not  arrive  at  his  excellency  of  character, 
he  was  born  perfect  in  holiness.  Men  become 
pure  by  repentance  and  penance.  The  higher 
types  of  human  purity,  the  excellency  of  a 
beautiful  soul,  has  never  been  reached  among 
men  without  repentance  and  self-abasement. 
Jesus  never  abased  himself,  never  repented 
before  his  Father,  never  asked  for  pardon 
and  mercy.  He  stands  alone  among  the  kneel- 
ing and  penitent  world  and  lifts  a  cloudless 


144  Is  Jesus  God? 

face  to  heaven  in  the  inexplicable  glory  of  pur- 
ity without  penitence  or  remorse.  Moral  pur- 
ity of  this  kind,  says  Godet,  is  not  only  with- 
out parallel,  it  is  without  approach.  All  men 
can  do,  all  we  can  do,  is  to  look  up  to  that 
face, — strong,  serene,  silent, — and  see  in  that 
wonderful  personality  something  of  the  divine 
Person  himself,  the  glory  of  an  Eternal  Spirit 
embodied  in  a  person.  The  divinity  of  his 
character  is  most  resplendent  in  his  perfect 
holiness. 

In  Jesus  alone  man  can  see  something  of 
the  holiness  of  God.  In  him  man  can  see 
how  God  asserts  himself  in  man  and  man 
can  assert  something  of  the  powers  of  God. 
"In  Christ,  man  by  the  voluntary  annihila- 
tion of  and  consecration  of  himself  became 
a  medium  so  transparent  that  the  glory  of 
God  could  shine  forth  in  him  to  perfection. " 
The  friends  and  contemporaries  of  Jesus  tes- 
tify in  an  overwhelming  way  to  the  fact  that 
he  was  a  "Lamb  without  spot  and  without 
blemish."  Even  Strauss,  the  greatest  adver- 
sary of  Christianity  in  our  time,  says  of  him : 
"Among  the  personages  to  whom  humanity 
owes  the  perfection  of  its  moral  consciousness 


Is  Jesus  God?  145 

and  holiness,  Jesus  occupies,  at  any  rate,  the 
first  rank.  In  regard  to  everything  which 
concerns  the  love  of  God  and  of  our  neighbor, 
to  purity  of  heart  and  purity  of  life  in  the 
inner  man,  nothing  can  be  added  to  that  moral 
intuition  which  has  been  bequeathed  to  us  by 
the  character  of  Jesus  Christ." 

The  purer  a  man  is  the  more  easily  he  de- 
tects sin  in  his  own  soul, — so  Christ  surely  by 
this  principle  would  have  detected  the  smallest 
sin  in  his  life.  But  does  such  a  confession  at  all 
spring  from  his  lips  ?  He  was  deeply  conscious 
of  his  own  perfect  sinlessness,  and  was  deeply 
conscious  in  his  heart  that  he  had  not  been 
guilty  of  the  smallest  omission  in  the  fulfill- 
ment of  his  imposed  task.     "I  have  glorified 
thee  on  the  earth  and  have  finished  the  work 
thou  gavest  me  to  do,"  is  the  simple  though 
profound  confession  of  his  soul  as  he  poured 
it  out  before  his  Father.     Let  us  close  this 
section  of  our  investigation  with  this  quotation 
from  Keim,  the  author  of  a  most  learned  book 
on  The  Life  of  Christ.     "Any  one  who  has 
given  himself    to  the    contemplation  of    the 
works  and  acts  of  the  Saviour,  receives  from 
it  an  irresistible  impression  that  we  have  be- 


146  Is  Jesus  God? 

fore  us  a  conscience  which  has  never  felt  the 
sting  of  the  sense  of  guilt.  And  this  is  not  a 
case  of  a  moralist  of  a  low  and  easy  standard 
of  morality.  Oh  no !  it  is  he  who  branded 
with  the  character  of  sin  a  bare  look,  an  idle 
word,  and  behind  the  veil  of  outward  act,  all 
impurities  of  the  heart  and  motives."  Paul 
bemoans  the  things  he  would  not  do,  yet  does. 
Socrates  finds  all  the  germs  of  all  the  evil  in- 
clinations in  his  heart.  But  does  he,  the 
Christ,  experience  anything  analogous  to  this? 
He  never  prays  for  pardon  for  himself,  either 
at  Gethsemane  or  at  Golgotha.  He  compels 
men  to  believe  in  his  perfect  holiness,  he  for- 
gives men  their  sins,  he  dies  for  them  and  as- 
cends into  heaven  to  take  his  place  upon  the 
judgment  throne  of  the  All-Holy  God. 
"Christianity,  both  as  a  creed  and  as  a  life, 
depends  absolutely  upon  the  personal  char- 
acter of  Jesus  Christ,  who  is  its  foundation 
and  its  Founder."  This  is  not  philosophy, 
this  is  not  religion, — this  is  a  fact. 

Did  space  permit  we  might  continue  our 
study  along  this  line  in  a  most  profitable  way; 
considering  how  through  his  sovereign  obe- 
dience he  rediscovered  for  man  the  path  to 


Is  Jesus  God?  147 

God  which  man  had  lost  through  disobedi- 
ence, his  wonderful  humility,  his  perfect  man- 
hood and  love.  We  could  see  something  of 
the  influence  of  his  character  upon  men  who 
have  come  in  touch  with  his  wonderful  life. 
But  we  will  not  stay  further  here  except  to  re- 
mark that  we  can  clearly  see  how  God  be- 
comes man  in  the  one  holy,  perfect  Man,  in 
order  that  by  faith  in  him  we  all  might  be 
raised  into  the  closest  and  most  direct  union 
with  the  Father  himself.  And  this  is  com- 
patible with  our  original  assumption,  that 
God  wants  man  to  reach  him  in  his  develop- 
ment, and  that  the  Christ  is  the  Way,  the 
Truth,  and  the  very  Life,  the  divine  Ideal 
Man. 

Not  only  does  the  supernatural  and  the  per- 
fect character  of  Jesus  afford  us  convincing 
evidence  of  his  deity,  but  so  also  do  his  works. 
One  of  his  divinely  appointed  works  was  the 
unveiling  of  the  Father,  which  prepares  the 
way  for  his  greatest  work  of  redemption. 
Undoubtedly  his  friends  and  disciples  did  not 
realize  at  first  the  divinity  of  their  Master, 
but  as  they  saw  deeper  into  his  life  every  day 
they  began  to  realize  that  he  was  something 


148  Is  Jesus  God? 

more  than  man,  that  his  deep  conception  of 
sin,  his  freedom  from  all  effort  and  restraint 
in  his  goodness  such  as  no  man  had  shown,  all 
bespoke  his  sinless  purity  and  sovereign  vir- 
tue. They  realized  that  he  was  on  the  most 
intimate  terms  with  the  Father  and  prayed 
with  a  freedom  and  friendship  which  was  ut- 
terly void  of  misgivings  and  regret.  He  put 
himself  beside  God  in  his  activity, — "My 
Father  worketh  hitherto  and  I  work."  He 
claimed  divine  origin  and  mission,  divine 
knowledge  and  fellowship.  He  claimed  to 
unveil  the  Father.  "He  that  hath  seen  me 
hath  seen  the  Father."  "I  am  in  the  Father 
and  the  Father  is  in  me."  Such  a  life  with 
such  confessions  from  the  deep  conviction  of 
his  heart  could  do  no  less  than  establish  a  pro- 
found belief  in  his  deity.  And  such  a  belief 
he  would  have  guarded  against  had  he  been 
merely  a  holy  man.  Such  was  the  belief, — 
though  perhaps  not  fully  formulated,  yet  lying 
at  the  heart  of  his  followers, — that  Jesus  was 
unveiling  the  Father,  who  had  been  to  them 
in  their  ancient  and  narrow  theology  a  great 
Unknowable  whose  name  they  dared  not 
utter. 


Is  Jesus  God?  149 

Then  his  consummating  work,  his  death  and 
resurrection,  clarified  and  confirmed  their  con- 
viction, and  with  this  confirmation  the  truth 
took  definite  shape  and  substance  as  an  active 
and  enduring  power  in  human  faith  and  wor- 
ship. Said  Madame  de  Stael :  "If  Christ  had 
simply  taught  men  to  say,  'Our  Father/  he 
would  have  been  the  greatest  benefactor  of  the 
race."  He  did  much  more  than  that.  He 
came  to  unveil  the  Father,  declaring  that  "no 
man  knoweth  the  Father  save  the  Son  and 
him  to  whomsoever  the  Son  willeth  to  reveal 
him."  And  he  has  willed  to  reveal  him  by 
his  life  and  death  among  men.  The  window 
through  which  men  have  sought  a  vision  of 
God's  love,  his  mercy  and  his  saving  power, 
was,  and  could  have  been,  nothing  else  than 
faith  in  a  real  and  complete  incarnation  of 
God  in  Christ.  "God's  love  and  personality 
were  made  distinct  and  radiant,  not  only  by 
the  recognition  of  an  eternal  Fatherhood  in 
his  nature,  but  by  the  light  of  the  knowledge 
of  his  glory  shining  in  the  face  of  a  person, 
and  men  saw  in  that  person  the  fullness  of 
the  Godhead  bodily."  And  it  has  been  for  this 
great  faith  and  belief  in  this  eternal  truth  that 


150  Is  Jesus  God? 

the  Church  through  the  ages  has  fought  to 
keep  that  window  open  and  to  maintain  against 
"direct  assault  and  secret  dissolution  the  real 
and  personal  deity  of  Christ. " 

Space  forbids  to  tell  how  the  great  doctrine 
of  the  Trinity  was  the  outgrowth  and  logical 
development  of  this  faith  and  conviction  of 
the  Church,  and  how  this  doctrine  moulded 
and  influenced  the  whole  conception  of  the 
Christ  in  the  history  of  the  Church.  We  could 
profitably  follow  further  his  great  work  in  re- 
deeming men  in  all  ages  and  how  his  wonder- 
ful power  is  still  rescuing  and  reclaiming  the 
wrecks  of  humanity  upon  life's  sea  and  send- 
ing them  out  to  do  a  man's  work.  How  his 
glory  and  love  are  still  shedding  a  light  lumi- 
nous and  radiant  of  a  new  truth,  a  new  phil- 
osophy of  life,  into  the  hearts  of  men  and 
nations.  How  he  as  the  center  and  soul  of 
the  Church  has  moulded  the  destiny  of  gov- 
ernments and  subdued  kingdoms  that  forgot 
his  name.  How  the  spirit  of  brotherhood  and 
fraternal  love  is  pervading  the  hearts  of  men 
in  all  climes  and  how  his  truth  is  reaching  the 
darkest  corners  of  the  world  and  the  whole 
earth  is  being  filled  with  the  knowledge  and 


Is  Jesus  God?  151 

love  of  God  and  his  Son  as  the  waters  cover 
the  sea.  But  let  it  suffice  merely  to  say  that 
the  evidence  from  every  phase  of  the  investi- 
gation overwhelms  our  imagination  and  sub- 
dues our  reason.  We  must  conclude  that  he  is 
the  logical  culmination  of  all  philosophical 
and  evolutionary  thinking,  and  that  his  whole 
life  and  personality  as  associated  with  his 
great  work  is  historically  consistent  and  he 
alone  satisfies  the  human  conscience.  He  must 
be  the  very  God  of  our  souls. 

In  closing,  let  me  suggest  three  convictions 
from  the  pen  of  Professor  Godet,  that  have 
impressed  me  very  deeply.  ( 1 )  That  it  is  im- 
possible to  detract  anything  from  the  doctrine 
of  the  essential  and  personal  divinity  of  Christ, 
without  at  the  same  time  infringing  equally 
upon  the  belief  in  the  intimacy  of  the  relation 
between  man  and  God.  (2)  That  whatever 
detracts  from  the  essential  and  personal  di- 
vinity of  Christ,  detracts  equally  from  the 
horror  which  we  feel  at  that  which  separates 
us  from  God,  i.  e.,  sin.  (3)  That  whatever 
we  detract  from  the  essential  and  personal 
divinity    of  our    Lord,    detracts  ipso    facto 


152  Is  Jesus  God? 

equally  from  the  glorious  reality  of  Christian 
holiness. 

And  now  after  this  hasty  review  of  the  evi- 
dence, and  from  the  faith  in  our  hearts,  we 
can  conclude  from  the  array  of  facts  and  from 
the  great  burden  of  proof  this  paper  has  mere- 
ly suggested,  that  he  is  no  other  than  the 
Alpha  and  Omega,  the  Beginning  and  the 
End,  the  very  Son  of  God  and  necessarily 
divine. 


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